My new piece asks why big liberal donors won’t reverse engineer all the work done by big conservative donors. Why do liberal Super PACs struggle? Why is there no (tongue in cheek, here) Club for Socialism that primaries bad-behaving Democrats?
Conservatives and libertarians have no philosophical beef with Citizens United. More money in politics? You might as well say “more freedom.” That is not how the liberal mega-donors think. “He finds it offensive to denigrate opponents,” says Jennifer Frutchy, an advisor to Peter Lewis for 25 years. “That’s not how he wants to spend his fortune—in an arms race, taking down opponents. He doesn’t want to be part of the negativity or corrupting influence money can have on the electoral process.”
I didn’t get to put it in there, but the mention of Lewis irritated Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas.
“Lewis won’t do anything that’s not pot related anymore,” he said. “In any case, Lewis and Soros are worthless when it comes to cleaning up the Democratic Party of its dead weight. In fact, they are pretty worthless in general to the progressive movement, for the exact reason you state. If you think that politics are too ‘icky,’ then fuck you. Go watch My Little Pony videos instead.” Democrats just didn’t have the same pH tests as Republicans. “Our definition of a ‘bad Democrat’ looks nothing like their definition of a ‘bad Republican.’ I mean, they’re going after people with near-perfect conservative records. We Democrats are generally pleased with electeds that stick with the party more than 80 percent of the time.”
