Media Transparency

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Bill Berkowitz
July 30, 2004

FreedomWorks Challenges Progressive Organizations

Citizens for a Sound Economy merges with Empower America to form new organization

Will the newly established conservative organization, stocked with old-line right wing warriors, impact Election 2004?

Will it be just another right wing group with fancy Washington, D.C. digs and handsomely designed stationary or will it challenge MoveOn.org and other liberal grassroots organizations that have mobilized progressive activists over the past two years? Will it recruit conservative activists in the battleground states or is it another high-profile venture for tired right wind culture warriors?

Stealing a page from MoveOn.org's successful organizing playbook, the leaders of FreedomWorks - a complete merger of the conservative think-tanks Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America - hope to conduct massive get out the vote and political education campaigns in the swing states on behalf of President George W. Bush.

The two groups decided to merge because there was "an overlap in issues between the two organization," Shawn Small, the Director of Policy at Empower America, told me in a telephone interview. It was an opportunity to bring together Empower America, which Small characterized as a "grasstops" organization driven by such inside the beltway "superstars" as William Bennett, Vin Weber and Jean Kirkpatrick and CSE's "grassroots" following.

Will FreedomWorks be successful? Maybe, maybe not, but it is sure to be controversial with longtime Republican Party operative Matt Kibbe at the helm.

If the agenda of FreedomWorks sounds familiar, that's because it is. The organization's new website proclaims that it "will expand and broaden the national fight for lower taxes, less government, and more economic freedom."

The leaders of FreedomWorks have all been around the Beltway a number of times. Former House Majority Leader, Texas Republican congressman Dick Armey, C. Boyden Gray, onetime legal counsel to Bush's father and chairman of the Committee for Justice, an organization about to launch a campaign on behalf of Bush's right wing judicial appointees, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and failed vice-presidential candidate, Jack Kemp, will serve as the Co-Chairmen of the organization.

William Bennett, America's self-appointed culture maven/heavy-duty gambler, co-founder of the education company K12, Inc., and Cabinet official in several previous Republican administrations will be FreedomWorks Senior Fellow in charge of pushing school vouchers. In March 2002, Bennett appeared at the National Press Club and announced the formation of Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (AVOT), an organization he said was dedicated to "tak[ing] to task those groups and individuals who fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the war we are facing." Despite its high-profile launch, AVOT appears to have been neglected in nearly a year: According to Empower America's Small, Bennett, who "spearheaded" AVOT has gotten involved with "his daily radio talk show," and hasn't had the time to put into the organization. Bill Bennett's Morning in America is syndicated by the Salem Radio Network, a division of Salem Communications Corporation. The last AVOT press release entered on its web site is dated September 9, 2003.

At the Washington, D.C. press conference announcing the launch of FreedomWorks, Matt Kibbe - who was President and CEO of Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) since June of this year - was introduced as FreedomWorks' new President and CEO. According to Kibbe the organization will be "a new and powerful answer to the challenge presented by the Left and groups like America Coming Together (ACT), MoveOn.org, and the Media Fund. Our mission is no less ambitious than fundamentally changing the way our government operates. We're going to create what President Bush calls an 'ownership society' built on freedom and individual empowerment, and we are going to accomplish it through broad citizen action."

Kibbe, who once worked for Lee Atwater, the late Republican Party National Chairman and legendary dirty trickster, has been spearheading CSE's campaign to get independent presidential candidate, Ralph Nader, on the ballot in Oregon - one of the swing states. "There are about 30,000 Oregon CSE members. We called about 1,000 folks in the Portland area and said this would be an opportunity to show up and provide clarity in the presidential debate," Kibbe said recently.

"We believe that hard work beats daddy's money," former Congressman Dick Armey said at the press conference. "MoveOn is doing all kinds of high-profile, big-dollar deals with money from George Soros and other rich Democrats.

"We can match that with people on the street who really care about Social Security retirement accounts, tax simplification, smaller government and freedom from frivolous lawsuits," Armey added.

Foreshadowing the possible domestic agenda of a second Dubya term, FreedomWorks' co-chairmen, citing the success of Reagan Revolution, laid out its "Contract with America" (redux?) with a "bold" agenda of "big ideas" in a July 22 letter to its constituents:

Although Bennett has been an outspoken culture warrior, CSE and Empower America have not taken positions on such social issues as abortion rights and same-sex marriage, Small said.

FreedomWorks claims a membership of over 360,000 and a multi-tentacled legal structure that includes a 501 c(3), a 501 c(4), a 527, a federal PAC, and various state PACs. John Stauber, co-author of Banana Republicans: How The Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State, recently pointed out that that according to internal documents leaked to the Washington Post in January 2000, the bulk of Citizens for a Sound Economy's revenues ($15.5 million in 1998) came not from its members, but from contributions of $250,000 and up from large corporations, including Allied Signal, Archer Daniels Midland, DaimlerChrysler, Emerson Electric Company, Enron, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Philip Morris and U.S. West (now Qwest).

The organization also maintains that it has "full-time campaign staff on the ground" in the electoral battleground states of Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin, and that it has "a sophisticated conservative political database containing over 600,000 activist names in all 50 states."

The fact that FreedomWorks looks towards MoveOn.org and other dynamic progressive groups as examples of organizations successfully getting its message out is an interesting twist of history. More than 30 years ago conservative ideologues like Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, and others made a point of monitoring and tracking the left because they were both impressed by its organizing strategies and chagrined by its successes.

For the next three decades, conservatives took organizing to a new level; creating an infrastructure of right wing think tanks, public policy institutes, media outlets, and leadership training centers. A "New Right" - an amalgam of religious and secular organizations - developed and succeeded in pushing a hardcore right wing political and social agenda. That movement grew into the political apparatus that has dominated political discourse in this country over the past two-plus decades.

During the New Right's hegemony, progressives watched and whined as conservative foundations and philanthropists gave time, energy, and money to build their movement. Now, in an unexpected turn of the worm, it appears veteran right wingers are once again looking to progressive organizations for effective grassroots organizing models.