(Everything you wanted to know about the RW Direct Mail which links into the campaigns against Social Security, Tom Daschle...and supports the likes of Swift Boat Liars/ Gan/Guck and the lies that have been used against Democrats. A long read for the weekend for those who know little about him and his connections. This is Berkowitz's review of a new book by Viguerie) Richard Viguerie: Still thundering after all these years
The King of direct mail's new book takes readers inside the conservative movement's new alternative mediaby Bill Berkowitz
The rise of Richard Viguerie; The rise of the right"Perhaps more than any of the New Right figures, Richard Viguerie has made a career -- and a fortune -- on the politics of resentment. With help from his colleagues Paul Weyrich and Howard Philips
, Viguerie was the political technician who turned abortion into an issue that made the Christian Right a mass movement," writes Sara Diamond in Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right, (South End Press, 1989), her groundbreaking work examining the rise of the Religious Right.
"Like many of the New Right leaders, Viguerie got his activist feet wet while working with Young Americans for Freedom in the early 1960's and with Marvin Liebman of the Committee for the Monroe Doctrine, formed in 1963 to agitate against U.S. 'accommodation' with Cuba," an argument still going strong within conservative ranks. Viguerie, like Phyllis Schlafly, the grand dame of the movement, and Weyrich got their start in the Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign.
In 1965, Viguerie got "the bright idea to start a direct mail business." Finding out that those who contributed $50 or more to electoral campaigns had their names registered with the clerk of the House of Representatives, he went down to Capitol Hill and got his hands on a list of 12,000 individual contributors to the Goldwater campaign. (Years later, Pat Robertson was able to turn the list of his contributors and supporters during his 1988 run for the Republican Party's presidential nomination into the database that would launch the Christian Coalition.)
According to Diamond, Viguerie made $100,000 in his first year in business, and in the next four years, mailed out more than 20 million letters.
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=18669
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