Unclear Priorities

But if McKay and Burger are to move the Alliance toward more effective progressive funding, they will have to rethink its priorities, starting with how many groups it funds and for how long. For the first round of grants, Alliance staff repeatedly stressed the importance of following four basic funding principles: Give organizations enough money to compete with conservatives; fund organizations over the long haul so they can achieve financial security and give them flexibility about how they use the money; make sure the groups work together; and urge the groups to use the money to affect public policy or engage with the political process.

In the second round of funding, however, the Alliance fell into the common liberal trap of needing to be all things to all people. After two grant cycles the Alliance is overextended. Wade says she hopes the Alliance, in conjunction with other funding coalitions, will eventually be able to direct an ambitious $500 million annually in grants. But with twenty-five groups under its tent, the Alliance will have to keep growing, by either recruiting new partners or convincing existing ones to give more, to be able to continue to fund those groups it has already agreed to assist. As a consequence, Alliance partners have cut back on some key priority areas, such as foreign policy, economics and media, in preparation for its third round of funding in Miami this November.

Of these, the media cutbacks are the most problematic. Conservatives have aggressively recruited and funded an array of authors, scholars and publications who have formulated controversial ideas. Then they marketed those ideas, through media, to wider audiences with the goal of changing public policy. To date the Alliance hasn't been deeply involved in idea creation in the same way conservatives have been, but at least initially it expressed interest in funding better ways of getting a progressive message out.

At the first meeting in Phoenix, Alliance partners agreed that funding media would be a front-and-center priority. Instead, says one early member of the media committee, "it keeps getting shuttled to the back, over and over." Partly that was because at the beginning of the process few members were familiar with progressive media. In time, the media committee developed a plan to fund bloggers, investigative reporting and media reform efforts. Now, in the run-up to Miami, says another media committee member, that plan has been slashed in half. Media Matters did receive an $11 million commitment over three years--but it only tracks right-wing media rather than producing original content. Air America Radio was supposed to receive between $5 million and $8 million from the Alliance, but after months of negotiations it still has received no money. Other efforts, such as The American Prospect magazine and the start-up Progressive Book Club, are also in limbo.

A funding shortfall only partially accounts for the Alliance's inattention. There are philosophical reasons as well. Idea creation takes time, media development is expensive and both are risky. And the Alliance is highly risk-averse.

Many of the right's premier ideas--welfare reform, rolling back détente with the Soviet Union, school vouchers--started off as a "riverboat gamble," as former Senate majority leader Howard Baker labeled Ronald Reagan's massive 1981 tax cut. "We did a lot of things at the beginning that we didn't know would work," says the Olin Foundation's Piereson. "If we needed a consensus it would've never gotten done." A conference of law students and professors partly underwritten by Olin in 1982 launched the Federalist Society, the right's premier legal organ. A $25,000 grant to the obscure social scientist Charles Murray led to his influential book on welfare reform, Losing Ground. And so on.

Risk aversion is also reflected in the Alliance's preference for underwriting organizations that won't upset the economic status quo. Podesta's CAP has been keen to avoid trade and globalization issues that separate the party elite from the rank-and-file Democratic base. While CAP won a $5-million-per-year commitment from the Alliance over three years, the unabashedly progressive Economic Policy Institute received a small, $250,000 planning grant. (The other economic organization funded generously by the Alliance, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, does research on issues like poverty in a nonpartisan fashion.)

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