In the time it took most Americans to plan their Labor Day picnics, Texans for Truth grew from a notion inside one Democratic activist’s head to a full-fledged political advocacy organization with $350,000 in the bank and an attack ad targeting President Bush scheduled on television.
Such is the ease with which nimble political operatives from both parties, orbiting outside the official campaigns of Sen. John Kerry and Bush, can spawn so-called 527 organizations to launch scathing offensives at their opponents and then, if they choose, disappear into the weeds.
Aided by the speed and reach of the Internet, abetted by a rush of instant media attention and enabled by campaign finance laws that grant them the ability to raise unlimited sums, these political organizations–named for the section of tax code that defines them–became indelible fixtures of the 2000 presidential election. In the 2004 campaign, they are proving even more agile and aggressive.
Texans for Truth, the creation of Texas Democratic political consultant Glenn Smith, was officially registered with the IRS on Aug. 31. By Tuesday of this week, it was unveiling a TV ad questioning Bush’s service record with the Alabama Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. By Thursday, the group had collected $350,000 in donations, Smith said.
Along the way, Texans for Truth benefited from a mass e-mail solicitation sent to tens of thousands of members of two affiliated anti-Bush groups, MoveOn.org and DriveDemocracy.org, as well as extensive publicity afforded by coverage of its commercial. The actual ad won’t air publicly until next week in the key states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Arizona and Oregon.
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Smith, an Austin resident who ran Democrat Tony Sanchez’s unsuccessful 2002 campaign for Texas governor, said he created Texans for Truth in reply to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group of Vietnam veterans backed by prominent Texas Republican donors who launched a TV commercial in early August alleging that Kerry lied about his decorated Vietnam service.
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth fired back Thursday, announcing plans for a new anti-Kerry ad to begin airing on Friday.
New anti-Kerry group
Meanwhile, another anti-Kerry group, called MoveOnForAmerica.org, has surfaced with a TV commercial alleging that Kerry, as a private attorney in 1982, secured a parole for a client who pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of a police officer. The group, which was registered with the IRS on Sept. 3, was created by Stephen Marks, a Republican political consultant based in Virginia who served as a press secretary to President Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush, in 1994. Jeb Bush is now the governor of Florida.
“It’s basically my group,” Smith said when asked about Texans for Truth in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C., where he was traveling this week. “Everywhere I went, people were asking me about the Swift Boat Veterans’ attack on Kerry. Given the mysteries and unanswered questions about Bush’s own military record, these questions need to be raised in a more visible way.”
The Texans for Truth ad features a man named Bob Mintz, who says he served as a lieutenant colonel concurrently in the same Alabama Air National Guard unit to which Bush was assigned in 1972. Mintz said he never saw Bush on the base.
“It would have been impossible to be unseen in a unit of that size,” Mintz says in the ad.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan suggested Thursday that Texans for Truth was acting as a surrogate for the Kerry campaign.
“I think you absolutely are seeing a coordinated attack by John Kerry and his surrogates on the president,” McClellan told reporters.
But Smith and officials of the Kerry campaign denied any connections or contacts over the Texans for Truth ad. That would be a violation of the rules governing 527 organizations, which are barred from directly endorsing candidates and are required to remain separate from them.
“Since I first had the idea, I’ve not talked to anyone on the campaign,” Smith said. “I intentionally did not tell them, because I don’t think I’m supposed to have contact with them.”
Smith said he attended the Democratic National Convention in July and talked with Kerry campaign workers there, but not about any plans for creating a 527 organization. The convention took place before the first broadcasts of the Swift Boat Veterans ads, which Smith said served as the impetus for the creation of Texans for Truth.
Kerry spokesman Phil Singer also said there is no relation between the campaign and Texans for Truth.
$350,000 in donations
“As far as I can tell, there is no connection between our organization and their organization,” Singer said.
While many 527 organizations try to obscure their origins or supporters, Smith said he was determined that Texans for Truth would be fully transparent. Its Web site explains that it is a direct offshoot of DriveDemocracy.org, a Texas group created last year to oppose the Republican-led redrawing of Texas congressional districts that could unseat five Democrats in the November election.
DriveDemocracy.org, in turn, was created and funded by MoveOn.org, which has spent an estimated $18.5 million on ads attacking Bush in the nation’s 100 largest television markets since March, according to ad tracker TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG.
“I have made it a point to be as transparent as I possibly can,” Smith said. “I am who I am–a pretty well-known Democrat in Texas. … I also happen to think that’s the responsible thing to do. I’m very happy for people to know who’s speaking up.”
Smith said most of the $350,000 his group raised this week came from individual on-line donations averaging $50 each. But $100,000–the largest donation–came from Los Angeles screenwriter Daniel O’Keefe, Smith said.
O’Keefe, a major Democratic donor, gave $1,000 to Kerry’s then-struggling campaign in December 2003, according to PoliticalMoneyLine.com. He contributed an additional $3,250 to Kerry in January, more than legally allowed; Kerry’s campaign refunded $2,250 in March.
In May, O’Keefe also contributed $2,000 to Kerry’s legal and accounting fund, separate from his main campaign fund.
News coverage of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had a similarly positive effect on that group’s fundraising efforts. The group says it has raised roughly $4 million from more than 50,000 contributors, with the vast majority coming from donations made on its Internet site.
“The free media we got … was very helpful,” said John O’Neill, a Texas lawyer who leads the group.
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A daily look at the presidential campaign
53 DAYS TILL ELECTION DAY: President Bush, in
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the economy. Sen. John Kerry, in Iowa, said the president
had failed to address the health-care crisis.
HARSH, HARSH, HARSH
The road to the White House is getting mighty rough. A Democratic campaign worker in Minneapolis displayed a bumper sticker at party headquarters: “Bush/Cheney– Most Hated World Leaders Since Hitler.” Republicans complained about the “repulsive smear,” and Democrats quickly took it down.
PRODUCT PLACEMENT
Cheney says the nation’s economic statistics are failing to measure an important marketplace: eBay.
“That’s a source that didn’t even exist 10 years ago,” he said in Ohio. “Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay.”
Other recent verbal skirmishes:
– Democrats thought Vice President Dick Cheney crossed the line this week by suggesting that a Kerry victory would make a terrorist attack more likely. On Thursday, former Vice President Al Gore called it “a sleazy and despicable effort to blackmail voters with fear.”
– Teresa Heinz Kerry, discussing her husband’s health-care plan, said: “Only an idiot wouldn’t like this. Of course, there are idiots.”
BY THE NUMBERS
1.6 million
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