Big $$ for Progressive Politics (Page 3)

At an October 2005 meeting at the Château Élan Winery & Resort in Atlanta, Alliance partners agreed to give $28 million to nine groups. A few were smaller, edgier, more progressive organizations, like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a legal watchdog that made headlines by drafting an ethics complaint against Representative Tom DeLay. But the bulk of the money went to familiar names on the DC circuit, like the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank run by Podesta, and Media Matters for America, which monitors right-wing media and media bias, headed by former conservative journalist David Brock.

The small number of groups chosen, some of whom were already well funded, and the secrecy of the process infuriated organizations excluded from the club. No one knew exactly why the nine groups had been picked. Funding progressive infrastructure was all well and good, but no one bothered defining precisely what "progressive" meant. The partners themselves, with their business backgrounds, focused on the process by which groups were funded, not what they would do with the money. "There was an almost complete lack of actual substance," one adviser to a major donor said of the Atlanta meeting. The groups were selected to mirror the right but were far less anti-establishment than their conservative counterparts.

In preparation for the second round of grants, the Alliance began to open up. Wade normalized the selection process so that groups could apply for grants. To appease angry partners, she decided that funding would be determined by a changing menu of issue areas, not based on gaps compared with what the right has funded.

From a morale perspective, the next gathering, in Austin, Texas, the following May, was notably more successful than the one in Atlanta. Leaders of the progressive movement, like labor leader Andy Stern, were invited for panels on economics, foreign policy and media. Heads of organizations mingled freely with partners. And the groups themselves were noticeably more diverse than the initial gathering in Phoenix, where sixteen of seventeen presenters were white males. "I've made it a mission to hate the Democracy Alliance," the head of one prospective organization told me, "and I was pleasantly surprised."

The funding choices themselves presented more of a mixed bag. As a result of inside maneuvering by partners to fund their favorites, less money went to more groups--$22 million to sixteen organizations, with much of it only for one year. Grassroots organizations working on racial and economic justice issues that probably would have been overlooked in the first round, such as the Center for Community Change, USAction and ACORN, made the cut. On the other hand, the issue areas targeted for spring funding--voter mobilization (known as "civic engagement"), youth outreach, Hispanic media and religious left activism--while all deserving, seemed chosen specifically to coincide with upcoming elections. And some of the larger groups funded, such as EMILY's List and the Sierra Club, hardly needed the money. The Alliance was created to think long-term and to fund gaps in progressive infrastructure. But with two major elections coming up, short-term electoral needs were bubbling to the surface.

Asurprise guest at the meeting was Bill Clinton, whose agenda seemed to be protecting his wife. But things didn't work out quite as planned. When Guy Saperstein, a retired lawyer from Oakland, asked Clinton if Democrats who supported the war should apologize, the former President "went fucking ballistic," according to Saperstein. Forget Hillary, Clinton said angrily during a ten-minute rant; if I was in Congress I would've voted for the war. "It was an extraordinary display of anger and imperiousness," Saperstein says.

The willingness to challenge Clinton at least temporarily reassured progressive Democrats that partners in the Alliance had a spine and wouldn't be a front group for "Hillary '08." But Clinton's response was a not-so-subtle warning to partners to avoid divisive issues, like the war, that might harm his wife in the next presidential election. Hillary herself has had a number of one-on-one sit-downs with members of the board, as has Howard Dean.

A month after the Austin meeting, a group of partners from the Alliance's progressive wing were elected to the board on an informal reform slate. They included Gara LaMarche of Soros's Open Society Institute, Anna Burger of SEIU, Drummond Pike of the Tides Foundation and Rob McKay, Taco Bell heir and president of the McKay Family Foundation. Many of these foundations have been at the forefront of funding progressive initiatives, like the campaign in California to pass a living wage. At a July retreat in Boulder, Colorado, McKay and Burger were elected chair and vice chair of the board. "This is the first really elected board," says Burger, a longtime union organizer. "It gives it legitimacy. People will feel more comfortable acting."

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