Abstract

The Beat Bush Brigades

The author reports on the activities of liberal groups organized outside the Democratic Party that are indirectly supporting U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry. With a budget that is expected to reach $95 million, ACT has fifty organizers and 450 canvassers working in Ohio, which Bush carried only narrowly in 2000, and is replicating that level of activity in the sixteen other swing states that hold the balance in this year's contest between Bush and Democrat John Kerry. ACT is one of dozens of independent progressive groups with ties to the labor, civil rights, environmental and pro-choice movements, which have been raising money, polling, strategizing and targeting key states with the purpose of dramatically increasing the turnout among angry voters. It is way too soon to judge how effective all this new activism will be, and there are problems, some serious, that must be addressed. But if the frantic reactions of Republican operatives are any indication, these groups are altering the political calculus of 2004. The 2002 election results were a wake-up call for progressives. The party apparatus has withered in much of the nation. [But] even if [Terry] McAuliffe and the DNC could get their act together, the party no longer has the financial flexibility to implement the sort of campaign needed to offset the advantages of the Bush/Cheney re-election effort and the Republican National Committee, both of which are flush with cash raised from their broader bases of well-off "hard-money" donors. To fill the void, Rosenthal and other veteran political players have created what friends and foes describe as a "shadow party."