This is a set of groups begun by wealthy donors, and appears to go either under the name of Democracy Alliance or New Progressive Coalition, which is the Rappaport group.
Here is the link to the NPC partner's page, on which I recognize a couple of groups started by people who were Dean supporters, so I am still trying to figure why they would crticize Dean's efforts on reaching the young people when he is setting the goal of rebuilding state parties. I am not at all sure what is going on here.
http://www.newprogressivecoalition.com/about/partnersThat site led to this article with a few names that rang a bell:
Can Democrats get Smart?
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/08/22/alliance/index.html?pn=1A couple of snips about one name that bothered me which has been in the news on our blogs lately because he works for corporations which do not want Net Neutrality. Mike McCurry's name caught my eye in this snip:
The effort has already attracted a group of about 80 wealthy donors who hope to eventually raise upward of $200 million for the cause. But their work has so far been kept a close secret. Eight months after forming, the Alliance has almost no public profile. It has yet to hold a press conference or issue a press release. There is nothing on its Web site, and its phone number and address, on Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Va., are unlisted. The group's new office space remains unadorned, with blank walls in the conference room, and the staff roster counts less than a dozen employees, not including outside consultants like Mike McCurry, one of Bill Clinton's former press secretaries.
Liberal activists are nonetheless abuzz with expectation, noting the firepower of the donors who have already signed up. "They will really be the first significant progressive venture capital organization that I know of," says Jon Cowan, president of Third Way, an upstart think tank, who is hoping for Alliance money. "Nobody does this." Members of the Alliance include billionaires like George Soros and his son Jonathan, former Rockefeller Family Fund president Anne Bartley, San Francisco Bay Area donors Susie and Mark Buell, Hollywood director Rob Reiner, Taco Bell heir Rob McKay (who, full disclosure, is also a member of Salon's board), as well as New York financiers like Steven Gluckstern. "These are not media-hungry people," says one person close to the Alliance. "They are serious doer types."
Please note the Third Way applied for donations, describing itself as an upstart group....it is the Clinton's group, started in the 1990s with Blair and Schroeder.
And even more confusingly, this snip shows that they have the same goals for the party as Dean does....rebuilding long term. So who is progressive, whose goals are for us? Who is using big money, and who wants small money. But this time, they are looking beyond the midterm elections in 2006 or the presidential showdown in 2008. Dozens of the richest people in America have banded together to develop a new, permanent network of progressive organizations that will, they hope, fundamentally alter the political direction of the country. Their idea is to create a sort of venture capital firm for progressive philanthropy, a new organization they call the Democracy Alliance. The Alliance will do very little substantive work itself. Rather it will direct six- and seven-figure donations to those groups -- whether they are think tanks, media outlets, or training programs for young liberal leaders -- that show the most promise.
"The Democrats for a long time have been fixed on the next election or the election after that," says Peter L. Buttenweiser, an heir to the Lehman Brothers securities fortune and one of the Democratic Party's most generous donors. "This is the first concerted effort to build the infrastructure of the progressive party in a way that replicates what the right has been doing for a long time."
Now let me present Mike McCurry who is mentioned above as being part of this group.
After leaving the White House in 1998, McCurry became a partner at Public Strategies Group in Washington, developing communications strategies for corporate and nonprofit clients.
He signed on earlier this year with a coalition of telecommunications companies battling an effort by large Internet companies to get Congress to pass rules that would outlaw any preferential treatment of data over the Internet.
Some phone company executives want to charge extra to guarantee fast and reliable delivery of video and other data-heavy applications.
As word spread of McCurry's role, bloggers started ripping him.
Last month, McCurry ripped back.
"On Net neutrality, I feel like screaming 'puh-leeeze,' " he wrote on the Huffington Post, where he sometimes blogs. "The Internet is not a free public good. It is a bunch of wires and switches and connections and pipes and it is creaky."
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-fi-mccurry5jun05,0,6380163.story?coll=la-headlines-politicsThis is all very complicated and confusing. Damn the word progressive. Howard Dean has started using the word "reformer". Let's see how they hijack that.
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