Published on Monday, December 1, 2003 by USA TodayKathy Kiely
President Bush a "liar?" Donald Rumsfeld a defense secretary who "betrayed" his troops? Republican leaders in Congress part of a "concerted effort to erase the 20th century?"
Not since Richard Nixon left the White House have liberals felt so free to be feisty. After decades of being shushed and shooed aside by centrist Democrats who feared the party's left-wing image was turning off voters, liberals have kicked their way out of the political closet. They are loud. They are angry. And they've got a whole new attitude.
"We have been too nice. We have been too polite," says Ann Lewis, a veteran strategist with the Democratic National Committee, where the official party weblog is called "Kicking Ass."
The sudden emergence of an outspoken left wing may be the most surprising political development of the year. Until recently, liberalism could not have been more out of vogue. But in the six months since Bush appeared under a "Mission Accomplished" banner on a Navy aircraft carrier, the political dynamic has changed. Some indicators:
• Five books attacking the president have been on the USA TODAY bestseller list since August: Dude, Where's My Country by Michael Moore; Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken; Bushwhacked by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose; The Great Unraveling by Paul Krugman, and The Lies of George W. Bush by David Corn. Their prominence has matched, at least for now, similarly angry tomes by conservatives. "There's a rising tide of liberal ideas," says Joe Conason, whose book about conservatives, Big Lies, was held back until Baghdad fell.
• The Internet has witnessed a surge of liberal activity. It's led by MoveOn.org, a Web-based political organization that has grown to 1.8 million members since it was founded during President Clinton's impeachment trial. MoveOn recently began a $10 million fundraising drive to pay for an anti-Bush ad campaign. One ad earlier this year featured Larry Syverson, a Richmond, Va., man with two sons stationed in Iraq who claims Rumsfeld "betrayed" them by failing to have a better post-war plan.
• Nearly two dozen liberal groups have created Americans Coming Together, an effort to coordinate labor unions, environmentalists and feminist groups for the 2004 political campaigns. And John Podesta, Clinton's former White House chief of staff, founded a think tank called the Center for American Progress to counter conservative idea factories that support scholars and churn out study papers. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton appealed for contributions to the center at the group's launch party, where she accused Republicans of trying to "erase the 20th century."
• International financier George Soros, who's worth about $7 billion, has pledged $15.5 million to anti-Bush, anti-conservative groups. He's giving $10 million to Americans Coming Together, $2.5 million to MoveOn.org, and $3 million to the Center for American Progress. He's also writing his own anti-Bush book. The Bubble of American Supremacy, a critique of the president's foreign policy, hits bookstores next month.
Hillary Clinton's presence as a keynote speaker at the center's debut party was a striking sign of the changing political times. Bill Clinton helped found the Democratic Leadership Council to move his party toward the political center and advocate policies appealing to voters who Democrats were alienating: blue-collar workers, rural gun owners, fiscal conservatives. He won the presidency twice by avoiding traditional liberalism. On some issues, like crime, free trade and welfare, he even tried to outflank Republicans.
In the presidential campaign this year, the most successful Democrat is doing just the opposite. Howard Dean is leading in most polls and has raised more money than his rivals by capitalizing on anger against Bush that is so strong, it surprises veteran Democrats. Rep. Robert Matsui, a California Democrat who has been traveling the country to raise money and recruit candidates for House races, says feelings against the president are running at near-vitriolic levels.
"I've had really intelligent people say, 'As soon as he gets on TV, I turn it off. I just can't stand him,' " Matsui says. "It's kind of stunning."
In conservatives' footsteps
Today's liberals admit they're trying to follow a trail blazed by conservatives. Some political historians trace the beginnings of the Republican rise to power to Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, a staunch conservative, in 1964. Like the Democratic liberals of the 1990s, conservatives then were viewed as troublemakers for the Republicans — zealots whose doctrinaire views cost the party votes.
Conservatives worked hard to regain a foothold in Washington after Goldwater's defeat. They founded grassroots organizations such as Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. They struck up alliances with conservative Christian organizations eager to oppose social policies offensive to their members. They used an innovative direct-mail fundraising system pioneered by conservative Richard Viguerie to find like-minded Americans willing to finance the cause. In 1980, they elected Ronald Reagan president.
But the conservatives didn't stop there. In the House of Representatives, which Democrats had controlled since 1955, a little-known Republican congressman from Georgia named Newt Gingrich got the idea to put the televising of House proceedings to work for their cause. Gingrich organized late-night talkathons in which he and other brash young ideologues would expound their views before the nation. Since the C-SPAN cameras never panned the chamber, viewers couldn't see that the speakers were declaiming to an empty House.
Conservatives took advantage of another medium in the 1980s: talk radio. Michael Harrison, editor of Talker, a newsletter that covers talk radio, says conservative commentators became stars because they spoke for Americans who didn't feel that their views were represented on TV networks or in newspapers — "people who were really angry at the press."
Like the conservatives who helped lay the groundwork for the Reagan and Gingrich victories, today's liberals are angry. They're still angry about Clinton's impeachment. They're angry about the war in Iraq and its aftermath. And they're infuriated that Bush got fewer votes than Al Gore but, in their eyes, is running the country as though he earned a mandate.
Liberals are convinced that their views are being systematically excluded from the mainstream media. They feel surrounded by hostile think tanks, cable TV hosts and newspaper columnists. "The conservative right has out-organized, out-researched, out-written and out-talked the liberals to the point where they're almost intimidated into silence," says former senator George McGovern, a South Dakota Democrat who lost the 1972 presidential election in a landslide to Nixon.
Fanning their outrage: The sense of powerlessness. Republicans control the White House, the Senate and the House. Liberals are convinced that Bush is out to pack the courts with conservatives. Ralph Neas of People for the American Way, a liberal lobbying group, says Bush wants to undo the work of Democratic presidents going back to Franklin Roosevelt.
Other liberals apparently share his fears. Franken is so angry about Bush that he's taking a detour from his career as a comedian. "I may do a radio show," the funnyman-turned-polemicist says. He promises he'll be as outspoken as the conservative talk jocks: "My contribution to the civility of the dialogue has been to get down and say, 'You're lying, and we're going to call you on it.' "
Playing catch-up
Liberals seem a long way from achieving the conservatives' success. Fewer than 20% of the people who respond to USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Polls regularly identify themselves as "liberal." About one-third call themselves conservative. By commercial measures, conservatives appear to be on top, too: On the Talkers' list of top dozen radio talk-jocks, none are liberal.
Another concern: Will a candidate who fires up the Democrats' liberal base alienate independent voters in November? Even as staunch a liberal as McGovern says their new aggressiveness could backfire. "It can be overdone, this pounding on the table," he cautions. "It could create a backlash."
Groups like America Coming Together and the Center for American Progress are part of the effort.
At least two attempts are under way to put more liberal voices on the radio. Tom Athans, the husband of Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., is trying to find and promote liberal radio talent. He and other liberals think part of the reason for their absence from the radio is that they have been, in Neas' words, "too earnest, too wonky" for prime time. Another group, led by former America Online executive Mark Walsh, hopes to buy radio stations and fill their airwaves with liberal programming.
Just as frustrated conservative activists did in the '80s and '90s, liberals have found a technological end-run around the established media: the Internet. Web-based connections helped transform MoveOn from a small group of disgruntled Democrats during the Clinton impeachment into a fundraising powerhouse. They helped turn Dean from an obscure governor of a small state into the man to beat for the Democratic nomination. Another innovation: weblogs. They're Internet sites that feature daily, even hourly, commentary by writers and publicly posted responses from readers. They're becoming incubators for a new generation of political activists, most of whom have little connection to party establishments.
"This is a technology that just clicks for them somehow," says Josh Marshall, the 34-year-old author of Talkingpointsmemo.com, a left-leaning weblog. Marshall says he gets about 40,000 readers a day. His recent appeal for contributions to finance a reporting trip on the New Hampshire primary yielded $4,864 in less than 24 hours. "I never thought I'd say this, but no more contributions!" Marshall wrote on his site.
Other liberal bloggers report similarly enthusiastic responses. Bill Scher, a 31-year old publicist who runs LiberalOasis.com from his Brooklyn home, says readers come to his site as an alternative to the mainstream press. "I think a lot of people felt the media was giving a pass to Bush," he says. Michael Stinson says he's had 60 million hits since founding Takebackthemedia.org in January. Says the 50-year-old Santa Barbara animator: "I've never seen so many people come together since the '60s."
Some conservative strategists see parallels with the situation they faced and the tactics they used when the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions were in their infancies. Most of all, they recognize a similar energy and tone.
"Republicans had better worry," says Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer. "Angry people are motivated to get out to vote. If they can channel that anger into something constructive, they can literally upset the presidency."
