The Smear Campaign; Left-wingers have poured money into Bush-hating "527" groups, which straddle a fine line in an all-out effort to defeat the president

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 11, 2004

Byline: John Berlau, INSIGHT

The life and odyssey of fiftysomething PR guru David Fenton has been one radical adventure after another. In the sixties he dropped out of high school and got a job as a photographer for the Liberation News Service, which favored the Viet Cong in the war against America, becoming a confidant of hippie leader Abbie Hoffman. In the seventies he would serve as public-relations director of Rolling Stone magazine and organize antinuclear concerts with leftie entertainers such as Jackson Browne. During the eighties he grew more corporate and at the same time more radical, building offices for Fenton Communications in New York City and Washington while fattening his payroll by performing services for various communist state and "liberation" groups, including the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, the dictatorship of Grenada's Maurice Bishop that President Ronald Reagan sent troops to overthrow in 1983, the El Salvadoran terrorist Farabundo Marti National Liberation group and the conspiratorial Christic Institute, which spread vicious, baseless smears about retired U.S. military heroes.

But on the eve of the nineties, as communism was falling, Fenton took the route of many leftists and donned the vestments of the radical greens. Hired by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), he orchestrated a media campaign attacking Alar, a pesticide sprayed on apples that respected scientists said posed no threat. He ran environmental scares over everything from allegedly declining sperm counts to nitrate containerization in drinking water. Along the way, Fenton got rich. According to a Weekly Standard article, he once told an interviewer he made about $100,000 per year in three years representing Sandinista interests. But he insisted to the neocon weekly in 1996, "I'm not a Marxist, I'm a Democrat!"

And in the first decade of the new millennium, Fenton is proving the latter to be correct if never explicitly disproving the former. He is a major part of what one Democratic activist describes to Insight as "a strange alchemy of McCain/Feingold, Internet fund raising and hatred of [George W.] Bush." Stir up this potion and you have a new phenomenon known as the 527s a species of private organization named after an obscure section of the tax code that now allows them to engage in the kind of political advertising forbidden to actual political parties. In this new landscape Fenton has become an important power broker because of his behind-the-scenes role in shaping the agenda of MoveOn.org and being a force behind the media campaigns of other "progressive" anti-Bush groups.

After the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the McCain/Feingold campaign-finance reform law as constitutional in late 2003, national parties no longer could raise and spend unlimited "soft money" for campaigns. Like campaign committees, parties can raise money only in maximum increments of $2,000 "hard-dollar" contributions from individuals. But a 527 political committee can raise unlimited resources even millions from a labor union or single donor. The 527s cannot directly advocate the defeat or victory of a candidate, but just how far they may go in communication or coordination with a political party or campaign currently is a question before the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

Because the Democratic Party was more dependent on large soft-dollar contributions from their wealthy supporters, in contrast to the GOP, which would get a substantial amount in small contributions from the rank and file, longtime Democratic Party activists such as Harold Ickes rushed out to form 527s and rich Bush-hating liberals such as currency speculator George Soros and Progressive Insurance's Peter Lewis have poured millions into groups such as Americans Coming Together, the Media Fund and MoveOn.org, which while away the hours demonizing George W. Bush. Noting that these groups were "crucial," former Clinton administration Energy secretary and now New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson told Fortune magazine that "organizations like these have become the replacement for the national Democratic Party."

Certainly no group is more important in the anti-Bush effort than MoveOn.org. Starting in 1998 as a California-based Website devoted to getting Congress to let Bill Clinton off with a censure and "move on," the group has moved on to attack Bush with bizarre spin on everything from the war on terrorism to the environment to taxes. And though MoveOn.org says it's a small grass-roots group, Insight has discovered that Fenton and his company, Fenton Communications, have for the last two years been the hidden hand behind its media savvy and presidential smears. To a large extent, MoveOn.org has become a creature of Fenton Communications.

A search of Lexis-Nexis and Internet databases shows that Fenton Communications has been listed as MoveOn.org's public-relations firm on press releases for the group and its affiliates since 2001. Indeed, MoveOn.org's Washington mailing address is on the same floor of the same building as that of the Washington office of Fenton Communications, and to reach a MoveOn.org employee in Washington, it's necessary to call the Fenton phone number. Fenton served as a judge for the group's recent "Beat Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest and contributed an essay to MoveOn.org's new book, 50 Ways to Love Your Country, by becoming a left-wing activist. Most telling is Fenton's use of personal pronouns in the essay to describe the group's activities. "Without the contributions of MoveOn members, we wouldn't be able to buy our own 30-second ads to unmask Orwellian deception propagated by our nation's leadership," Fenton wrote (emphasis added).