Ezra's up earlier than me
He's picked up on this NY Times Magazine piece, Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, already
I'm not done with it yet, but Matt Bai's latest piece, profiling the rise of the next next next Democratic party, is really essential. As a day on the blogs shows and a scan of the primaries proves, the energy and appeal of the Democratic Party is coming from outside the party structure. Bai's article articulates exactly how it's being channeled. Well worth reading.
…though a different section caught his immediate attention than mine.
Spurred on by legal reforms that were in fact supposed to reduce the torrent of private money into politics, the new political venture capitalists see themselves as true progressives, unbound by any arcane party structure. If their investment ends up revitalizing the Democratic Party, so be it. If they end up competing with the party to control its agenda, or even pushing the party toward obsolescence -- well, that's fine, too.
As the old union bosses and factional leaders who dominated the Democratic Party in the 20th century file into the FleetCenter this week, waving signs and hooting for their heroes, be sure to take a long, last look. The Democratic Party of the machine age, so long dominant in American politics, could be holding its own Irish wake near Boston's North End. The power is already shifting -- not just within the party, but away from it altogether.
By the time this election year ends, George Soros will have contributed more than $13 million to the independent political groups known as 527's. (The term is shorthand for the section of the tax code that makes them legal.) For this reason, Republicans insist that the 74-year-old Soros, who may become the largest single political contributor in history, has resolved to buy the Democratic Party.
This is, on its face, a little silly. To put things in perspective, $13 million is a fraction of what it takes to run a serious modern presidential campaign, let alone control a party. And Soros, who made his fortune as an international investor, is worth an estimated $7 billion; his foundation alone gives away some $450 million every year. In other words, if George Soros really felt like buying the party, you would know it. For Soros, spending $13 million on a campaign is like you or me buying 100 boxes of Thin Mints from the Girl Scout next door.
The real significance of Soros's involvement in politics has little to do with the dollar amount of his contributions. What will stand out as important, when we look back decades from now at the 2004 campaign, will be the political model he created for everyone else. Until this year, Democratic contributors operated on the party-machine model: they were trained to write checks only to the party and its candidates, who decided how to spend the money. But by helping to establish a series of separate organizations and by publicly announcing that he was on a personal mission to unseat Bush, Soros signaled to other wealthy liberals that the days of deferring to the party were over. He became what the financial world would call the angel investor for an entirely new kind of progressive venture.
