George Soros told a carefully vetted gathering of 70
likeminded millionaires and billionaires last weekend that they must be
patient if they want to realize long-term political and ideological
yields from an expected massive investment in “startup” progressive
think tanks.
The Scottsdale, Ariz., meeting, called to start the
process of building an ideas production line for liberal politicians,
began what organizers hope will be a long dialogue with the “partners,”
many from the high-tech industry. Participants have begun to refer to
themselves as the Phoenix Group.
Rob Stein, a veteran of
President Bill Clinton’s Commerce Department and of New York investment
banking, convened the meeting of venture capitalists, left-leaning
moneymen and a select few D.C. strategists on how to seed
pro-Democratic think tanks, media outlets and leadership schools to
compete with such entrenched conservative institutions as the Heritage
Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Leadership
Institute.
Senior Democratic National Committee (DNC) officials
were quietly briefed about the meeting in recent weeks. DNC Chairman
Howard Dean was aware of it, in part though his friendship with Stein,
but one senior DNC source said the organizers “kept that list [of
attendees] kind of tight.”
Sarah Ingersoll, de facto spokeswoman
for Stein’s Democracy Alliance, said it was “a very preliminary meeting
of committed donors interested in building a community to support
progressive infrastructure.”
The Democracy Alliance will act as
a clearinghouse and is expected to channel much of its money to new
organizations and existing ones such as John Podesta’s Center for
American Progress and David Brock’s Media Matters for America.
The money details are several weeks away. “There aren’t dollar figures at this point,” Ingersoll said. Soros,
a Hungarian-born financier who donated more than $23 million to
pro-Democratic 527 groups last cycle, gave the main presentation, said
Ingersoll, who declined to name the other presenters.
“Primarily,
we’re looking at making recommendations and thinking through with these
donors on how they can form an alliance,” she added. “This is about
creating a network of individuals to share information to be effective
in whatever they do going forward.”
Participants were
tight-lipped, saying they wanted to keep media expectations low, even
suggesting that the Scottsdale gathering was too insignificant to
report. Other participants included former White House press secretary
Mike McCurry and New Democrat Network president Simon Rosenberg. Andy
Rappaport, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and reliable investor in
liberal causes, did not attend the meeting, his spokeswomen said.
Ingersoll said funding transparency is a priority, which she said would contrast with some right-wing groups.
But
transparency was not on display among the Scottsdale participants
contacted by The Hill. Details of the meeting remained sparse.
Most
of the participants had already seen Stein’s slick presentation titled
“The Conservative Message Machine’s Money Matrix,” which lays out how
right-leaning donors have funded and invested in organization that
churn out conservative ideas. Stein unveiled his presentation at the
Democratic National Convention in Boston last year, at an event hosted
by Rosenberg and NDN.
Ingersoll denied that progressives are merely trying to replicate Heritage and Fox News.
Another
source at the meeting said that it was important for existing
progressive groups to coordinate their activities and to avoid the turf
wars that have riven progressive causes in the past.
One source
at the DNC with direct knowledge of the agenda said that the Phoenix
Group had three specific goals at the outset. It wants to create
liberal think tanks, training camps for young progressives and media
centers.
Despite the general recognition that progressives are
several years behind conservatives, liberal activists are confident
that technology will help them close the gap. “Technology may allow us
to do in a few years what it took the other side 40 years,” the DNC
source said.
But the Phoenix Group is not beholden to the
political calendar, and several sources insisted that four-year
electoral exigencies were not motivating the project. Indeed, part of
the reasoning in keeping D.C. consultants away from Scottsdale was to
shield the high-tech donor base from political operatives, who are
always eager for quick dollars to buy media points and fund direct mail.
“This is bigger than that,” the DNC source said
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