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"America Coming Together" Comes Apart
by Byron York, National Review EFLA few days after the 2004 election, America Coming Together, the giant pro-Democratic voter turnout group that had raised about $200 million from George Soros, Peter Lewis, and a variety of Hollywood moguls, released a list of its accomplishments. Obviously, ACT, as big as it was, had not put John Kerry over the top, but the group had "held conversations at 4.6 million doorsteps about the truth about the Iraq war, about the state of our healthcare system, about the economy." It had registered half-a-million new voters. In the last days of the campaign it had made 23 million phone calls, sent out 16 million pieces of mail, and delivered 11 million fliers. And on top of it all, it had "launched the largest get-out-the-vote effort the Democratic Party has ever seen," turning out "unprecedented levels of voters in the battleground states." It all sounded very, very impressive. And then ACT listed its accomplishments at the polls, and the results seemed far less impressive. . . . Soros and all his colleagues had spent $200 million to elect a Democratic secretary of state in Missouri. The question that hung in the air at the time was whether, after such a defeat, the big donors would continue to support ACT â to get ready for the next big campaign â and help it grow into an even larger turnout machine. And now we have the answer: No. On Tuesday ACT, which had already downsized dramatically in the months since the election, pink-slipped most of its remaining staff and shut down all its state offices. The money had dried up, the donors were on to other things, and the "largest get-out-the-vote effort the Democratic Party has ever seen" was over. "Lord "You have failed me for the last time. . . ." Throughout its life â it started when Ellen Malcolm of EMILY's List, Steve Rosenthal of the AFL-CIO, former Clinton operative Harold Ickes, and others held a downcast post-election dinner in November 2002 at a restaurant in Washington's Dupont Circle neighborhood â America Coming Together operated on the assumption that big, big money would bring victory to the Democratic party. . . . In July 2003, they traveled to Southampton, to the estate of "Someday - and that day may never come - I'll call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this as gift . . ." . . . In all, America Coming Together, along with its sister organization, the Media Fund, raised and spent about $200 million. And as Election Day approached, the organization gave off an air of confidence born of the belief that it was simply too big to fail. In a way, it didn't fail. In 2004, America Coming Together helped create a record Democratic turnout â a performance that would have been a fabulous success had not the other guys turned out even more. In the end, though, the problem for ACT was not that it failed to turn out voters. The problem was, despite its claims to be reaching more people than ever before, it really did not reach a lot of new people. America Coming Together was not, in fact, America coming together; it might more accurately have been named Traditional Democratic Party Constituencies Coordinating Like Never Before. . . . Despite all the hype and all the press releases, the effort really wasnât about converting new voters to the Democratic party. Rather, it was about squeezing just a little more juice out of a lemon that had been nearly squeezed dry in the past. Steve Rosenthalâs well-regarded successes in previous elections had not involved attracting large numbers of new people to the cause. They involved getting union voters to turn out in ever-greater percentages, even as the percentage of union households in the electorate shrank. The problem was, you could do that for only so long. At some point, every union member or union household member of voting age could turn out and it still wouldnât be enough to elect a Democratic candidate. For that, you had to expand your appeal, and that was something ACT failed to do. Malcolm, Rosenthal, and Ickes discovered that you could call it America Coming Together, but saying so didn't make it true. "What is it?" "It's a message. America Coming Together sleeps with the fishes." Posted by: Mike 2005-08-03 |
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