Dems Plan $40M Hit On McCain

Wealthy Democrats are preparing a four-month, $40 million media campaign centered on attacks on Sen. John McCain. And it will be led by David Brock, the former investigative reporter who first gained fame in the 1990s as a right-wing, anti-Clinton journalist.

The planned campaign is the product of a shakeup in the top ranks of the struggling independent Democratic groups. Brock, now best known as the ex-conservative founder of the liberal group Media Matters, last month quietly assumed the chairmanship of what's expected to be the main vehicle for independent Democratic attacks on McCain, now called Progressive Media USA.

The move comes after the groups that had been expected to spearhead attacks on McCain — the Fund for America and Progressive Media USA's previous incarnation, the Campaign to Defend America — failed to raise the money needed to dent McCain's armor.

"We're a little behind where we need to be," he said.

But after a dinner Tuesday night at the Manhattan apartment of liberal megadonor George Soros, at which Brock and consultant Paul Begala laid out the group's plans, Brock said his group now has commitments worth $7.5 million — almost twice what the Fund for America is expected to report raising in the first quarter of this year. He said the group would begin running ads before it meets its $40 million goal.

Brock suggested that the group could do the work of a press corps that, he says, has "fallen down on the job" when it comes to McCain.

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"A void that might be filled, while the Democrats fight it, out by the press is not going to be filled, because the press is in love with John McCain," Brock said in an interview at the Regency Hotel in Manhattan. "It's what McCain is allowed to say without being challenged by facts that will show him to have said something different in the past."

Brock's most recent book is called "Free Ride: John McCain and the Media." 

Brock wouldn't detail Progressive Media USA's strategy, and stressed that — as required by his group's nonprofit status — the spending would be on a mix of direct electoral politics and issue ads with no direct connection to the race.

But he said he's scrambling to raise "a few million" dollars more this month to get ads on the air — ads which have already been drafted for the group by a number of Democratic consulting firms.

"There's a sense of urgency, and people want to go, and we want to go, and the question is bringing the money in to say we're ready to go," he said.

Brock's remarkable emergence as a leader of the Democratic Party's shadow campaign efforts marks a milestone in a long personal journey that began in the early 1990s with the notoriety he gained from magazine stories written for The American Spectator, a conservative monthly. Among his controversial articles was one alleging that Bill Clinton had used Arkansas state troopers to facilitate his philandering, a piece that set the wheels in motion for Paula Jones to file suit against Clinton for sexual harassment. In 1993, Brock authored "The Real Anita Hill," a critical book about the woman who accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.

Brock later apologized to Clinton in a public letter and broke publicly with the conservative movement. He wrote about his disillusionment in his 2002 memoir "Blinded by the Right," and Hillary Rodham Clinton later helped him establish Media Matters, which criticizes reporters for alleged right-wing "misinformation."

Brock is now seen in political circles as closer to Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign than to Sen. Barack Obama's, but Brock said he has already met with former Senate Majority Leader Tom Dascle, a close Obama ally.

"This is a unity play," Brock said.

Donors had begun to complain that while the Campaign to Defend America had built a large organization — it has, Brock said, 29 staffers, most devoted to "research" — it had failed to show it could mount a large-scale media campaign.

The Campaign to Defend America aired a single ad called "McSame" in small markets in Ohio and Pennsylvania and ran polls after it aired to test its impact.

The ad features President Bush's head cut and pasted onto McCain's shoulders, as a narrator intones that their policies on a range of issues are "McSame."

"We need a new direction, not the McSame old thing," the narrator concludes.

"It tested off-the-charts well," said Brock, referring to his group's research into viewers' reactions to the ad.

Brock's words, and his unpaid chairmanship, reflect alarm that Democrats are missing an opportunity to define McCain, even as the presumptive nominee tours the country telling his own story. The plan, conceived last fall, had been for the Fund for America to raise $100 million from wealthy Democrats, and to transfer it to groups including the Campaign to Defend America and America Votes, a Soros-backed independent group aimed at strengthening Democrats' field organizing.

But Fund for America has been unable to raise the money, and Campaign to Defend America had agreed not to raise its own money. Last Thursday, Brock said, he informed an official of the fund that his group would begin directly raising its own funds, a move that puts the usefulness of the Fund for America in question.

"We are as committed at Progressive Media USA to having the money we need to fully execute our mission as we are to seeing to it that America Votes has the money to execute its mission," he said, a formulation that appeared pointedly to exclude the Fund for America, which had been established as a kind of parent organization.

Brock added that he was open to continue to raise money jointly with the Fund for America — if the distribution is "equitable."

The organizational shakeup also reflects a move away from MoveOn.org, the influential activist group that relies on money from small donors, and back toward the Democratic establishment. Brock's arrival means that Tom Matzzie, a former MoveOn staffer who remains the secretary of Progressive Media USA, is no longer the group's most visible official. A founder of MoveOn, Wes Boyd, also left the group's board, and a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Susan McCue, joined as the group's treasurer.

Brock said that with the help of a new legal team, the group had solved a key question connected to its financing. Incorporated as a 501(c)4 nonprofit, the group has the advantage of not being required to disclose its donors. But it is barred by law from taking money from unions, a major source of funds for progressive causes. Brock said he was creating a linked 527 group, Progressive Media Action, which would accept — and disclose — union and other funds.

Though donors and operatives say they expect the group's highest profile work to be attacks against McCain, the new Democratic groups were conceived to build an infrastructure lasting beyond this election, and Brock — whose Media Matters is on the vanguard of the well-funded new liberal establishment — said Progressive Media USA would live beyond this year's election.

Brock said Los Angeles real estate magnate Steve Bing was among a group of donors backing his group's long-term mission — despite many Democrats' expectations that Bing and other Clinton supporters would only contribute if Clinton is the nominee. Soros, the group's key backer, supports Obama, and hosted a key, early gathering of the senator's wealthy New York supporters.

Brock aid the group would be a ready-made vehicle to conduct media campaigns backing liberal causes on short notice, an analog to the partisan conservative message machine, giving liberals "the ability to create a real echo chamber."

He recalled that in 2004, his fledgling group had debunked "90 percent" of the content of an advertisement Swift Boat Veterans' for Truth that challenged Sen. John Kerry's war record — but had no way to distribute the information.

"Progressive Media USA will be a permanent part of progressive media infrastructure," he said.

But while the group's long-term goals may be broader, Brock says his commitment to the group is on a different timetable.

"I've committed to doing this through November," he said.