Travis
----- Original Message ----- From: "Curtiss Leung" <curtiss_leung at ibi.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2004 5:38 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] The Opposition to Bush,a subsidiary of Soros Fund Management
> >From an article in today's WSJ, "Soros Has a Hunch Bush Can Be Beat":
>
> But Mr. Soros isn't just writing checks and
> watching; He is also imposing a business model
> on the notoriously unruly world of politics. He
> demands objective evidence of progress, and assigned
> an aide to monitor the groups he supports. He studies
> private polls to track the impact of an anti-Bush
> advertising campaign, and he is delivering his money
> in installments, giving him leverage if performance
> falters.
>
> This makes my head spin, and not in a good way. "[H]e is
> delivering his money in installments, giving him leverage if
> performance falters." So if $X million to whomever fails to
> give the desired downtick to Bush's approval ratings, he'll
> just take his checkbook and go home? And am I supposed to
> believe that his checks come without recommended positions?
>
> Am I just being too cynical, or does this give others here a
> bad, bad feeling?
>
> NB: I found the official webpage for Soros' Open Society Institute,
> but nothing for the Quantum Fund, or Soros Fund Management--plenty
> of stuff *about* them, sure, but no official webpage. I guess openness
> only goes so far.
>
> Entire article follows. Snarky comments in parentheses.
>
> Curtiss
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
>
> Soros Has a Hunch Bush Can Be Beat
>
> Billionaire Puts His Weight, Money Behind
> Democratic Effort to Oust President in '04
> By JEANNE CUMMINGS
> Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
>
>
> NEW YORK -- When he was an active currency trader, George Soros bet
> heavily on his hunches, most famously when he made a $1 billion profit
> on a 1992 bet that the British pound was overvalued. Now convinced that
> President Bush is overvaluing America's supremacy, he's betting at
> least $15 million that he can help oust him in November.
>
> The 74-year-old billionaire's clout and largess has made him the
> most important money man in the Democratic Party this election
> year, as he raises funds for candidates, donates to left-leaning
> activists and lobbies wealthy friends to do likewise. Wednesday
> night, he co-hosted a New York event to help a new voter-registration
> project.
>
> Republicans are concerned enough to mount a legal assault to
> slow him down. They have appealed to the Federal Election
> Commission to hem in Soros-backed, tax-exempt advocacy and
> voter-mobilization groups by forcing them to adhere to limits
> on political donation and spending. The FEC will take up the
> matter Thursday.
>
> But Mr. Soros isn't just writing checks and watching; He is also
> imposing a business model on the notoriously unruly world of
> politics. He demands objective evidence of progress, and assigned
> an aide to monitor the groups he supports. He studies private polls
> to track the impact of an anti-Bush advertising campaign, and he
> is delivering his money in installments, giving him leverage if
> performance falters.
>
> Certainly Mr. Soros -- whose estimated fortune of $7 billion puts
> him 28th on the Forbes 400 list of the world's richest people -- is
> one big reason new channels for political money have become such
> a hot subject this year. He doesn't sit on the boards of the groups
> he supports, or weigh in on day-to-day strategy. Still, his opinion
> matters, and the group organizers give him early warning of any brewing
> controversies -- such as the time when one mistakenly posted on the
> Web a proposed anti-Bush commercial that compared the president to
> Adolf Hitler. The ad was never broadcast commercially.
>
> Of course, Mr. Soros doesn't always enjoy the golden touch.
> His two early Democratic presidential primary picks -- Howard
> Dean and Wesley Clark -- are struggling. But that may not
> matter to Mr. Soros, who said in an interview that Massachusetts
> Sen. John Kerry's foreign policy best reflects his own global thinking.
> (Oh yeah, something else to give me the warm and fuzzies about
> Soros --CL)
>
> It was the Iraq war that prompted Mr. Soros to break his tradition
> of staying out of presidential campaigns. As troops were sent to
> Iraq, he began writing "The Bubble of American Supremacy," which
> was recently released and argues that the administration's reliance
> on military power to impose its global vision is dangerous and as
> untenable as the inflated technology stocks of the late 1990s.
>
> His next step was to amplify other voices of dissent. Early in
> 2003, he pledged $3 million over three years to the Center for
> American Progress, a think tank founded by former Clinton aide
> John Podesta to counter conservative voices.
>
> After an April dinner at his Manhattan apartment to discuss
> Mr. Podesta's project, Mr. Soros pulled aside two senior aides,
> Morton H. Halperin, a former Clinton aide who directs Mr. Soros's
> Washington-based Open Society Institute, and Michael Vachon, a
> personal assistant who is overseeing Mr. Soros's political projects.
> Mr. Podesta's think tank was a good long-term project, he said,
> but was there a role Mr. Soros could play in the 2004 campaign?
>
> To ensure an unbiased assessment, he hired two separate political
> teams to evaluate Mr. Bush's strengths and weaknesses, the tactics
> needed to beat him and how much it would cost. Heading one team was
> Tom Novick, a former Oregon state legislator who had recently done
> a report concluding that voter mobilization was a better investment
> than last-minute television ads. The second group was lead by Mark
> Steitz, a Washington-based political analyst who had done a similar
> assessment of President George H.W. Bush's 1992 re-election chances
> for some wealthy Democratic donors.
>
> Working independently, both teams reached the same conclusions: The
> electorate remains split, and Mr. Bush is vulnerable because of
> the troubled economy and messy aftermath of the Iraq war. They found
> that 17 states, most in the Midwest, are in play, but the only way
> Democrats could win was to upgrade their voter-mobilization machine
> and come up with cash to pay for TV ads during the spring when Mr.
> Bush is expected to use his nearly $200 million war chest to try to
> bury the Democratic nominee.
>
> On July 17, Mr. Soros and other potential donors gathered in
> his Southampton, Long Island, home to receive the findings, and
> soon began peppering Mr. Novick with questions about how old-fashioned
> get-out-the-vote operations had become an increasingly scientific
> business in modern politics.
>
> Mr. Novick, for instance, told Mr. Soros that 70% of union members
> who got a call from unions voted for Al Gore in 2000, according to
> the AFL-CIO. Only 61% of union members who weren't contacted voted
> for the losing candidate in that close election.
>
> A strategy for defeating Mr. Bush by activating new voters appealed
> to Mr. Soros because it reflected tactics the Hungarian native -- he
> is a naturalized U.S. citizen -- began using in the early 1980s to help
> promote democracy in Eastern Europe. He bought copying machines
> for Hungarian dissidents, for example, and connected Russian college
> instructors to the Internet.
>
> But he wanted a sound corporate structure, and under his prodding
> the group stopped thinking about "what can we imagine getting" and
> started focusing on "what is necessary to win," says Mr. Steitz. By
> morning, the outlines of a new organization began to emerge, and Mr.
> Soros pledged $10 million to get it started. His friend, Peter Lewis,
> chairman of Ohio's auto-insurance giant Progressive Corp. and an
> attendee at the Southampton sessions, agreed to match the gift. To
> give his newest venture some leverage with other potential donors, Mr.
> Soros agreed to announce his donation early to stimulate other
> giving. In August 2003, the new organization was unveiled under the
> name: America Coming Together.
>
> Mr. Soros then set out to diversify his political investment. On
> Sept. 17, Wes Boyd, the California-based founder of MoveOn.org, a
> liberal online organization founded during the Clinton impeachment
> trial, arrived in New York for what he thought would be a
> get-acquainted session with Mr. Soros.
>
> Mr. Soros said he was prepared to offer the group a $2.5 million
> "challenge grant" and asked Mr. Boyd what he thought would be an
> appropriate match to seek from MoveOn members. "I was caught
> flat-footed,"
> says Mr. Boyd, who offered a 2-to-1 deal. "I will never live it down,"
> he
> says. Funded by the effort, MoveOn recently launched the first in a
> series of ads criticizing Bush policies.
>
> "Lord of the Democrats," shouted a Republican fund-raising letter
> shortly after Mr. Soros's third donation to a liberal organization
> became public. The National Republican Senatorial Committee called
> him an "out-of-touch, left-wing radical" pushing an "extremist agenda
> on America." Republicans in Washington combed through newspapers and
> books and quickly circulated anything provocative about Mr. Soros. He
> gave them a fair amount to work with.
>
> He helped finance voter referendums allowing first-time drug offenders
> to receive treatment rather than jail time and one legalizing
> doctor-assistant suicide, and helped pay for distribution of the
> so-called morning-after pill, which is the next abortion
> battleground. "I stand on those issues," he says. As for his
> conservative critics, he shrugs and says: "I'm on the other side."
> (Give the devil his due: these I like --CL)
>
> Write to Jeanne Cummings at jeanne.cummings at wsj.com
>
> Updated February 5, 2004
>
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