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Jerry Landay
March 17, 2004

The Apparat

George W. Bush's back-door political machine

It's anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional, and is working to create a one-party America

On a Tuesday evening in mid-January, a right-wing Washington writer-for-hire named Clark Judge appeared on public radio's Marketplace.

In a commentary heard by an estimated five million people, Judge complained that the philanthropist George Soros was engaged in an "unethical" effort to outwit legal restrictions on campaign contributions.

Judge huffed that Soros, along with the Democratic Party, was "ponying up" millions of dollars in funding to tax-exempt, liberal advocacy organizations to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush. He labeled Soros and the Democrats "prime abusers," for using barely legal tactics to evade the contribution ceilings of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law.

Judge was correct when he implied that legal and IRS regulations that are supposed to curb political activities by tax-exempt non-profit organizations are riddled with loopholes. Judge went much farther, though, implying that Soros and the Democrats had cornered the market on cheating. He warned his listeners to "brace...for the biggest tidal wave of political sewage in American history" from these Soros-supported organizations.

The Pot and the Kettle

In political parlance, Judge was acting as a surrogate. He had no apparent connection with the Bush campaign. But he had struck a blow for Bush's re-election on behalf of the political propaganda machine of the organized right. To the uninitiated, Judge's credentials seemed to lend throw-weight to his attack: managing director of the White House Writers Group, an umbrella firm of former ghostwriters for Republican presidents and bureaucrats now at the service of anyone willing to pay.

But only those in the know would understand the flaws in Judge's statements. He failed to mention that hundreds of tax-exempt organizations of the far right have been exploiting the twilight zone of campaign and IRS regulations for three decades -- receiving billions of dollars in grants and contributions to wage ideo-political warfare for far-right ideas, causes, and Republican candidates. Liberal political organizations resort to the same shortcuts, but they pale when compared to the scale and duration of right-wing mischief. Judge is one more cog in a vast machine that, in the judgment of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP - website) has "played a critical role in helping the Republican Party to dominate state, local and national politics." It is now operating at full throttle to keep Bush in office.

Though its activists like to call themselves conservatives, there is nothing they wish to "conserve" beyond their power, status, and wealth. They are right-wing radicals who have stolen the GOP away from the true conservatives who once dominated it.

The Cohort

In its latest report, called The Axis of Ideology, the NCRP has identified at least 350 tax-exempt, ostensibly non-partisan organizations within the right-wing's activist front, many operating at regional, state, and local levels. They have penetrated the three branches of the federal government, and dominate the political debate. They guide and oversee the agenda that directs White House action (or inaction). Two of these organizations housed the planners who invented the Iraq war.

Rob Stein, an independent Washington researcher, follows the money flow to the radical activist establishment. He estimates that since the early 1970s at least $2.5 to $3 billion in funding has been awarded to the 43 major activist organizations he tracks that constitute the core of the radical machine.

He terms the big 43 the "cohort" -- an "incubator of right-wing, ideological policies that constitute the administration's agenda, and, to the extent that it has one, runs its policy machinery."

He calls the cohort "a potent, never-ending source of intellectual content, laying down the slogans, myths, and buzz words that have helped shift public opinion rightward." The movement's propulsive energies are largely generated within the cohort.

Stein describes it as movement conservatism's "intellectual infrastructure" -- multiple-issue, non-profit, tax-exempt, and supposedly non-partisan. The apparatus includes think tanks, policy institutes, media-harassment enterprises, as well as litigation firms that file lawsuits to impose their ideological templates on the law.

They mastermind the machinery of radical politics, policy, and regulations. They include campus-based centers of scholarship, student associations, and scores of publications. The shorthand of their faith is well known: less government, generous tax cuts for the privileged, privatization or elimination of Social Security and Medicare, rollbacks of environmental safeguards, major curbs on the public's right to go to court, and a laissez-faire free market system unfettered by regulations or public-interest accountability. Bush campaigns to advance the ideological agenda of the right, and the radical front in turn campaigns for Bush.

Roots

In the early 1970s, when the movement was spawned, most of the seed funding came from a relative handful of private foundations established by far-right industrialists and inherited wealth.

They included, most notably, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, the John M. Olin Foundation of New York City, the quartet of foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife of Pittsburgh, the Smith Richardson Foundation (Vicks), the Castle Rock Foundation (Coors beer), and the Koch family foundations (energy).

Today, the right's funding base has hugely expanded. The NCRP now identifies a total of 79 private foundations that make grants to right-wing political action groups. The NCRP estimates that those foundations granted some $253 million to the 350 activist organizations between 1999 and 2001 alone.

Scores of for-profit corporations add millions more to the funding stream. These include Time-Warner, Altria (Philip Morris), AT&T, Microsoft, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and other members of the pharmaceutical industry, the two titans of the military-industrial complex Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as well as telecommunications, banking, real estate, and financial interests. Precise information on corporate contributions to tax exempt organizations is scarce since the IRS does not require their public disclosure.

The NCRP report concludes that the right-wing domain these billions has built has "undoubtedly helped advance, market, and strengthen the conservative agenda in all policy realms," from international relations and so-called "preventive" war-making, to a raft of domestic issues.

Broadsiding Soros

Months before the 2004 Presidential campaign had officially begun this prodigious apparatus was already engaged in a massive, unofficial campaign to re-elect George W. Bush. As part of this campaign Clark Judge's radio assault on Soros was classic political disinformation.

By itself one radio appearance may not seem indicative of a grand right wing conspiracy; however, it was in reality part of something much bigger: a well-coordinated campaign against Soros, aimed at undermining the funding machinery of an emerging progressive counter-movement.

In another such coordinated action right-wing attorneys have petitioned the Federal Election Commission, trying to hobble progressive activist groups from collecting so-called "soft money." James K. Glassman, a cheerleader for the budget-busting Bush tax cuts and a senior scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, in an article titled "The Soros Threat," labeled Soros "a great threat not just to the re-election of George Bush, but to our truly open society" -- a sly word play on Soros' longtime interest, the pro-democracy Open Society Institute.

Glassman also [used to] write[s] a nationally syndicated business column for the Washington Post, and earlier had gained notoriety by penning a book in 1999 urging readers to snap up lots of stocks -- just before the market crashed. Writer Nicholas Confessore accused Glassman of "Journo-lobbying" -- using his writings as an influence- peddling instrument on behalf of favored corporations.

From his perch at the Free Congress Foundation, Paul Weyrich, a Glassman ally and senior member of the radical right's influence machine, was warning followers against the "little-known" anti-Bush coalition aided by Soros. The website GOPUSA.com, was swiveling its polemical sights from a faltering Howard Dean to Soros, describing him, a Jew, as "a descendant of Shylock."

Soros and his recipients -- including Americans Coming Together, MoveOn.org, and the newly established liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress -- are no match, in terms of dollars or mass, for the vast alliance spearheaded by the cohort.

Americans are familiar with some of the names, if not the background, of the cohort's leading members -- the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Federalist Society, the Reason Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the National Association of Scholars, to name just a few.

According to columnist/broadcaster Laura Flanders, right-wing ideologues have been setting up their own, extensive, tax-exempt front groups for years. Their purpose is to influence public opinion to aggressively push GOP rhetoric, candidates and issues.

This network labored to defeat President Clinton's health plan, and later worked to impeach and remove him from office. They "stirred the scandal pot," says Flanders, "to turn the public against policies and social trends they opposed." With the onset of the 2004 presidential campaign, this machine is back in the scandal business on behalf of the Republican nominee.

A mighty megaphone

Just as Democratic Senator John Kerry emerged as his party's leading contender for its presidential nomination in late January, he immediately became fair game for the right's "scandal pot."

Much of what has ensued is reminiscent of Richard Nixon's infamous "plumbers" unit, the dirty-tricks squad that operated out of the White House that destroyed his presidency.

The opening salvo of the 2004 plumbing season was to distribute photographs faked to show Jane Fonda and Kerry ostensibly appearing at the same peace rally.

Another mudslinging campaign was designed to entrap Kerry in a fabricated sex scandal. It began with a planted "story" on the Drudge Report, designed to be picked up by the British press, with the intention that it would "bounce back" into the American media. Ironically, the US media wouldn't touch the story, but neither did it expose the right's failed methods.

As if on cue, a bevy of conservative-front columnists from the Washington Post to the Champaign News-Gazette opened a coordinated attack against Kerry and his key supporters.

Leading the way was a website operated by the Heritage Foundation, Townhall.com, which prominently displays the work of the venomous Ann Coulter.

Coulter had earlier upbraided former Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a war hero and paraplegic who lost three limbs in the Vietnam War.

Cleland had committed the sin (to Coulter) of publicly questioning the military record of George W. Bush. Coulter attacked with characteristic malice and hyperbole. She wrote that Cleland was "lucky" to have had his limbs blown off. She went on to assault liberals who "have suddenly become jock-sniffers for war veterans."

Cleland was already aware of how the right's attack machine works. He had lost his Senate seat in Georgia in 2002 after the Republicans ran ads juxtaposing his face with those of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Also, the chairman of the GOP faxed doctored Congressional testimony to the press to create the false impression that Wesley Clark had supported the Iraqi war.

A "tidal wave of sewage," indeed.

Besides hosting Ann Coulter, Townhall.com serves as a web portal for more than 70 nationally syndicated columnists of the radical right, ranging from former Gingrich spokesman Tony Blankley to former Jesse Helms speech writer George Will. There is no comparable website on the left. The hailstorm of polemics generated by Townhall.com serves as the daily grist for the hundreds of talk-show hosts who have tilted the American airwaves sharply rightward.

A John Kerry spokesman described the result:

"From Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham to Saxby Chamblis to the RNC, you can't turn on a TV or a radio without seeing a systematic, coordinated attack on John Kerry."

The positioning of these right wing operatives within the "mainstream" media surely puts the lie to the old "liberal media" canard, which despite its demonstrable falsity is still standard cant for the conservative propaganda mill. This myth serves to divert attention from the stunning dominance of the right wing in media.

A look at the 15 most widely syndicated newspaper columnists makes the point: Nine -- 56 percent -- are solidly right-wing. Of the remaining six, only three are solidly liberal -- Molly Ivins, Nat Hentoff, and Ellen Goodman.

The far right machine also controls the microphone. The top 27 syndicated on-air hosts are right-wing. There is not one liberal voice among them. Journalists and personalities of the right reach millions of people through hundreds of radio and television stations, and cable channels.

The impact of this machine on the 2004 national political campaigns will be hard to calculate. It has only just begun.

Spokespersons for the radical front have already fanned out as ready-to-air guests on talk and interview programs, transmitting the identical pro-Republican line of the week. They pen hundreds of boiler-plate op-ed pieces daily, which newspaper editors are often happy to run, possibly because they are offered for free. The radical front links web sites to mobilize barrages of e-mails, letters, and phone calls promoting Republican causes.

For a graphic idea of the reach of the propaganda operation, just one organization, the Heritage Foundation, notes in its 2002 Annual Report that more of its experts were seen on national television within that single year than during the entire 1990s. In 2002 alone, Heritage analysts were featured on more than 600 television broadcasts, more than 1,000 radio broadcasts, and in some 8,000 newspaper and magazine articles and editorials.

Political commentator David Gergen has noted that the integrated propaganda organs of the far right have created "a new politics in America," with its "ability to mobilize and interact with core constituencies on issues ranging from immigration to tax policy to welfare reform."

The machine's efforts, which are misperceived by the populace as divorced from the GOP and the Bush White House, allow the President to appear above the fray at photo-ops and fund-raisers, while the unofficial machine augments his firepower and campaign bank accounts.

The rise of right-wing power

While it is true that liberal operatives, dedicated organizations, and funding sources exist in some numbers, the current right-wing juggernaut of hard cash and sharp edged political power really has no equal in American history.

Researcher Rob Stein says the key difference is that the left employs no organizational cohesiveness. Efforts are fragmented, disconnected, and, for the most part, focused on single issues. The lack of coordination is compounded by opposition control of the White House.

The potency of right wing politics and opinion molding lies in the architecture of the movement. That is, its constituent organizations think and act strategically. Agendas, priorities, and propaganda are directed from the center. Members are disciplined and dedicated to the narrow theology of the right.

The disparate streams of conservative thought and action -- social, economic, religious, libertarian, and corporate -- set aside major differences and march to a single drummer -- with the tempo set at weekly tactical conferences in Washington.

This cohesion has undeniably had a large impact on the American body politic. The far right coalition now effectively controls the three branches of the federal government, overriding the checks-and-balances against rampant political power built into the Constitution. Conservatives now also set the terms of the national political debate through their dominance of the unofficial "fourth estate," the media.

The model that appealed to pioneer right-wing organizers for this type of social/political/legal campaign was, ironically, located to the left -- Ralph Nader and his Raiders -- a band of activists united for consumer rights in the early 1970s.

Nader's campaigns against corporate excesses eventually galvanized businessmen to an aggressive defense of the capitalist system, which they felt was in danger. Conservatives feared that the war in Vietnam had rendered America a paper tiger. The failure to liberate the American hostages in Teheran in 1979 became an emblem of the collapse of American might.

Domestic tranquility had been shattered by racial unrest, assassinations, and burning cities. "The glory hath departed," intoned the Rev. Jerry Falwell on CBS, as he organized his Moral Majority to "save" the nation. America, he preached, had lost its power, lost its values, lost its virtues. And he blamed the liberal movement for all the ills. With the Nixon landslide against McGovern in 1972, the right also sensed its moment. The Reagan victory in 1980 confirmed it.

The ultra-conservative William Simon, a financier, Treasury Secretary, and then president of the Olin Foundation, decided it was time to bring conservative wealth, manpower, and organizational ability to bear on the creation of a "counter intelligentsia" to roll back the "despotism" of the "Liberal Establishment."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce widely distributed an influential memo by a Richmond attorney named Lewis Powell, who would subsequently become a Supreme Court justice, calling for a conservative assault against what he viewed as the central echelons of liberal power -- the campus, the media, the courts, and politics.

Out of this tempest emerged what Sidney Blumenthal has called the "counter-establishment." A host of right wing intellectuals would staff "new institutes, writing policy papers and newspaper editorials ... serving as political advisers, lending the power of the word" to a movement to lead the counter-charge.

Many of these intellectuals were defectors from Communism, disillusioned by the excesses of the system, their personal quest for status and power unrequited. They were joined by disaffected liberals, ambitious operatives hungry for the power to make things happen. Both were familiar with the byzantine state machinery that ran the former Soviet Union.

On their relatively short march from the radicalism of the far left to that of the far right, they transferred their experience in marketing one set of absolutist ideas to another dogma already at home within the American community of privilege.

Right-wing radicalism offered not only a formidable ladder with which to scale the ramparts of power, but the money to make it happen. A new "host of conservative institutions" rooted and flourished. It took three decades for this burgeoning power to elevate George W. Bush to the White House. It now labors to keep him there.

The Soviet apparat

The architectural shape of the right-wing counter-establishment resembles the apparatus that ran the Soviet Union. The Russians called it the "apparat" -- a vast bureaucratic web of power that housed the organs, official and unofficial, of the ruling Communist Party.

It included the administrative departments that fictively ran the Soviet government. In fact, the party ran it all. Its ruling Politburo and Central Committee were paramount. The Soviet apparat was headed by a privileged ruling class, the nomenklatura, manned by a faceless army of bureaucrats, the apparatchiki.

The structure of the apparat was triangular, comprised of the party, the organs of state security, and the military establishment. The leadership elite in the Kremlin presided over all of it.

The organs of propaganda and media were also housed within the apparat, together with the Comintern, which oversaw the Communist parties of other countries. It included scores of activist front operations. They carried out agitprop - incitement and manipulation of opinion among the masses. These popular-front operations appeared independent, but were linked covertly to the apparat in Moscow.

The American apparat

The American apparat of the far right can be viewed as a variant of the Soviet model - amorphous in overlapping functions at the top but monolithic in its aims. It is an external government that guides the federal government. In a stunning sense, it is counter-revolutionary and anti-Constitutional.

The American apparat has learned from the failures of the Iran-Contra and Watergate operations, which functioned within the government, and were thus subject to governmental oversight and correction. Not so the apparat. With its operations spread over a spectrum external to government, it attracts neither official nor media attention. It operates invisibly -- in the open.

The NCRP writes, "There is considerable organic alignment and cohesion on the right." Conservative funders and non-profits are all on the same page, dedicated to the broader goals of radical politics.

The American apparat functions as a broad strategic, policy-formulating, and coordinating machine. Like the Soviet apparat, it is triangular in structure. The main leg can be viewed as the nomenklatura -- the central command of the cohort. Subordinate to it is the second leg -- the major units of government, including the White House and the Congressional majority. The President governs as the creature of the apparat, along with his cabinet.

Vice-President Cheney bridges the two as a senior member of the nomenklatura. So does Karl Rove, the White House political operator, along with the leaders of the Republican Congressional wing -- Senate and House majority leaders Bill Frist and Tom DeLay.

The third leg can be viewed as the Republican political wing. In the party realignment of 1992, the national Republican apparatus was taken over by the apparat, and reduced to an appendage. The national party is now principally a tool for the disbursement of campaign largesse; and it supervises the machinery of elections and coordinates state party functions.

Edwin Feulner, Jr., president of the Heritage Foundation, the fountainhead of the cohort and the single largest recipient of right-wing philanthropy money ($44 million between 1985 and 2002), is a senior member of the apparat. The Heritage Foundation laid down the primary policy blueprint for the incoming Reagan Administration in 1980. It was called Mandate for Leadership: Turning Ideas Into Action. Eighty percent of its recommendations were deemed accomplished by the end of the Reagan era. Heritage has produced similar action blueprints for succeeding Republican presidents, including the administration of George W. Bush.

After Bush II's selection by the Supreme Court, the Heritage Foundation also served as personnel clearing house and hiring hall for senior government positions. Elaine Chao, the former Heritage Foundation fellow who supervised the hiring, is now Secretary of Labor.

Social and religious conservatives exert profound bottom-up influence on the apparat and White House. They spring from the bedrock, where the voters are. Only elections can overturn the apparat's hold on political power.

The American apparat must be responsive to its popular base, especially the mandates of such populist organizations as the National Rifle Association, American Family Institute, and Family Research Council, with their roots in the grass roots. We have witnessed the President's sensitivity to the base, especially on such issues as gun ownership, opposition to immigration and abortion, resistance to gay marriage, and so-called "activist judges."

Like its Soviet counterpart, the American apparat is also a closed society, largely unelected and unaccountable to the body politic, and casts its penumbra upon the White House. As in the former USSR, there is little discussion or debate. Loyalty is absolute -- "you are either with us or you are with our enemies." Under Bush and Cheney, brisk exchanges of view, the engine of policy formation in prior administrations, are discouraged. Cabinet meetings are scripted for a president unprepared for spontaneous exchanges (as revealed in documents posted by Ron Suskind, that were used to research his best-selling The Price of Loyalty).

The endgame for the apparat is a one-party state in which elections project only a vestigial appearance of democratic process. It is run, in effect, by the ruling oligarchy, whose members are beholden only to the apparat.

The leave-us-alone coalition

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) is day-to-day operations director of the apparat's tactical machine.

Every Wednesday at the Washington headquarters of ATR, more than a hundred representatives of major right-wing organizations throng the conference room. Present are White House and Congressional staffers, lobbyists, industry representatives, right-wing think tankers, hard-right editors, and litigators. Attendance is by invitation only. Norquist calls the Wednesday gathering his "Leave Us Alone" coalition, an anti-government line that conceals the real goal of creating a corporate socialist state.

"Here," writes Michael Sherer in Mother Jones magazine,"Strategy is honed. Talking points are refined. Discipline is imposed ... Norquist plays the role of national ward boss, delivering the coalition that has rallied around the president's policy agenda." Norquist consults regularly with the White House, notably Karl Rove and "Scooter" Libby, Vice-President Cheney's chief of staff, and, in turn, channels the worldview of the apparat to them.

Sherer took note of Norquist's view of his populist base: "My ideal citizen [is] the self-employed, home-schooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit -- because he doesn't need the goddamn government for anything." Here's where Norquist's standard-issue buzz-phrases find fertile pasture: "out of sync with America," "card-carrying liberal from Massachusetts," "the extreme elements of his party," "pro-abortion and pro-gay." As the adage goes, control the rhetoric and you control the debate.

Boosting the Bush agenda

Amidst a sea of voters who largely agree with liberal positions on social issues, the apparat has created a great equalizer, its multi-million-dollar propaganda megaphone.

The Heritage Foundation, a leading promoter of the Bush tax cuts, spearheads the President's plan to make them permanent. In op-ed articles and interviews, Heritage scholars use sleight-of-hand to defend the deep deficit caused by the tax cuts; they attribute it to the "runaway growth" of discretionary domestic programs. Actually, discretionary, non-security-related spending amounts to less than 3.4 percent of GDP, inconsequential compared to the whopping cost of Bush tax cuts and war.

Economists for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) reinforce the line. They present a welter of statistics to counter Democratic calls for tax rollbacks. Newspaper editors tend to view NBER numbers as non-partisan. In fact, NBER delivers customized numbers to sell the right-wing agenda. Its CEO, Professor Martin Feldstein of Harvard, headed the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan. NBER has received more than $10 million in support since 1985 from right-wing foundations.

An examination of NBER by The New York Times found that its oft-quoted economic analyses are highly partisan, and that "Feldstein has shown little taste since the 1980s for straying from the Republican Party line."

Early in 2004, the Washington Legal Foundation's Daniel Popeo placed ads on the op-ed page of The New York Times, defending the Bush administration's assault on civil liberties as the price of waging its "war on terror." Popeo's ads criticized "ideologues" on the left for putting civil liberties ahead of "Americans' right to live free from terror."

Meantime, the libertarian Cato Institute was promoting a four-day "Social Security University" for legislators and their staffs on Capitol Hill -- a major effort to win Cato InstituteCongressional support for the privatization of Social Security as the best medicine for the "coming insolvency." Cato has led the White House campaign for "private savings accounts," the cornerstone of the right-wing effort to transform Social Security from a durable pension program into a long-term source of commissions for Wall Street brokers. Cato's proposed "reform" would cost the government an estimated $1 trillion to implement over the next decade.

Defending Bush in Iraq

The doctrinal blueprint for the Iraq War was drawn prior to the 2000 election by neoconservatives Dick Cheney and Richard Perle, as senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, together with colleagues at the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Both are hard-line organs of the apparat. In February, news stories detailed the misuse of intelligence data by the Bush administration to justify its war on Iraq. Right-wing bankroller Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard responded with a cover article by neoconservative war boomers Robert Kagan and William Kristol of PNAC justifying "the Right War for the Right Reasons" against the "serial aggression" of Saddam Hussein.

Further, they went on to blame the Clinton administration for the tragic events of 9/11. At the same time, the Foundation to Defend Democracy (FDD), yet another think tank of the apparat, was defending neoconservative hard-line positions on Iraq and North Korea.

The FDD had been launched after 9/11 by Clifford May, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee, to promote Bush doctrinal policies. FDD fellows are pushing their messages with regularity and vigor as contributors to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and other influential publications.

The apparant's Club for Growth is underwriting TV spots for the Bush campaign. So is Citizens United, a front for agitator David N. Bossie, last heard from as the congressional aide who got fired for doctoring audio tape in a failed attempt to incriminate the Clintons in the Whitewater affair. Citizens United is also responsible for the infamous "Willie Horton" ads aired on TV in 1988 to help elect Bush's father.

Crossing the line

Right-wing organizations regularly stray across the no-politics restrictions placed on tax-exempt organizations. Mother Jones magazine relates that Grover Norquist's tax-exempt ATR applied nearly $5 million funneled from the Republican National Committee into attack ads and direct-mail solicitations in the 1996 presidential campaign.

Norquist is openly soliciting contributions for ATR from wealthy GOP donors in 2004 to end-run McCain-Feingold limits: "I am aggressively letting people who might want to be involved ... know what we do," he said.

The line between many of these tax-exempt advocacy groups and the Republican Party is as porous for politicians as it is for money. The organizations of the apparat are incubators for putative political candidates on the rise, and bestowers of generous sinecures for Republican politicians between jobs. After serving loyally as House majority leader, Dick Armey moved effortlessly into the well-paid job of co-chairman of Citizens for a Sound Economy.

The Center of the American Experiment (CAE), a regional clone modeled on the Heritage Foundation, operates essentially as a personnel agency of the Minnesota Republican Party. It has been used repeatedly as a springboard for Republican politicians.

In 2002 it scored a trifecta, helping elect three Republicans to high office: Norm Coleman as a U.S. Senator, Tim Pawlenty as Minnesota Governor, and John Kline as a U.S. Congressman. Now key members of the CAE populate top positions in the Pawlenty administration.

Abusing and using the media

The apparat's media-attack organizations are charged with keeping journalists in line, mobilizing the base to wage harassment campaigns against media organizations and reporters they dub as too "liberal." Journalists who dare criticize the Administration are priority targets for abuse. For that reason, among others, Americans learn almost nothing from mainstream media about the apparat, whose media-attack operations effectively silenced Hillary Clinton's charges of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" operating against her husband's administration.

In an essay critiquing the news media for its massive failures in the run up to the Iraq war, Michael Massing wrote in The New York Review of Books that reporters who wrote articles unfavorable of Bush received "tons" of hate mail and threats questioning their patriotism. Massing wrote:

"Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and The Weekly Standard, among others, all stood ready to pounce on journalists who strayed, branding them liberals and traitors -- labels that could permanently damage a career."

Three core media-attack groups operate at the center of the apparat: Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media (AIM), David Horowitz' Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), and L. Brent Bozell's Media Research Center (MRC). All three are now mobilizing behind the Bush re-election campaign.

Earlier this year, MRC, which takes on the task of "neutralizing liberal media bias," issued a broadside to its rank-and-file against CBS anchor Dan Rather, for tossing what it alleged were soft questions at Democratic primary candidates -- a marked contrast, it maintained, to the "rough" treatment Rather allegedly dishes out to Republicans.

Earlier, Accuracy in Media had joined The Weekly Standard in trying to shift responsibility for 9/11 away from the White House and onto the Clinton administration.

Have progressives finally got it?

It has taken 30 years for the progressive left to pay serious heed to the apparat. In the run-up to 2004, progressives have belatedly begun weaving an advocacy web of their own to join in a vigorous battle of ideas for voter allegiance.

Last year, John Podesta, formerly Bill Clinton's White House chief of staff, established the first latter-day, purely liberal think tank to promote "progressive ideas" for "a strong, just, and free America," the Center for American Progress (CAP). The Center's daily Progress Report, a web chronicle of political developments, has become one of Washington's must-read journals. According to Matt Bai in The New York Times, Podesta's goal is:

"An organization to rethink the very idea of liberalism, a reproduction in mirror image of the conservative think tanks that have dominated the country's political dialogue for a generation."

CAP is also a recipient of funding from George Soros. After giving away more than $5 billion to promote democratic institutions in Russia and Eastern Europe, Soros realized that his own adopted country is losing cherished freedoms.

He has dedicated more than $15 million to counter the momentum of the Bush administration and its apparat. Soros was motivated by what he termed the "supremacist ideology" of the far right, which kindled childhood memories of the Nazi occupation of his native Hungary. "America, under Bush," he has said, "is a danger to the world. And I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is."

Soros has created a philanthropic model for other progressive donors. Until now, they have largely been ineffective in their patronage, diluting contributions across a broad swath of single-issue advocacy groups on a short-term basis. The organizations of the apparat have been under no such strictures. Its benefactors have made long-term investments in multi-issue advocacy organizations, whose agendas promote the broad ideological agenda of the radical right.

Progressive donors must study -- and improve upon -- their methods. That includes creating a centralized approach to united action -- a mode of operation to which liberals, until now, have been congenitally allergic.

In an op-ed article in The New York Times, Robert Reich, the secretary of labor under Clinton, argued that progressive activism must extend beyond the race for the White House, and beyond campaign season. "The conservative movement," he writes,

"has developed dedicated sources of money and legions of ground troops who not only get out the vote, but also spend the time between elections persuading others to join their ranks ... It has a system for recruiting and electing officials nationwide who share the same world view, and will vote accordingly."

Reich calls for the creation of a broadly-based activist front on the left -- a "populist movement to take back democracy from increasingly concentrated money and power."

As individuals, most liberals and many independent voters share a set of humanistic values that have defined America for most of its modern history. Win or lose in November, liberals must now revive that America, charting a return to power in a concerted, long-run campaign to unseat the anti-Constitutional, one-party apparat.