The Smear Campaigns

[Woodmonkey]

Post April 26, 2004

By John Berlau

Bush-bashing Democrats work behind the scenes to shape the smear agenda of MoveOn.org.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 lefty 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 smear 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. Soon rich Bush-hating liberals including currency speculator George Soros and Progressive Insurance's Peter Lewis were pouring 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 governor 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 "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).

Evidence of Fenton's handiwork can be seen in recent ads MoveOn.org has placed with other liberal groups that happen to be Fenton clients. The ads stating that "Congress must censure the president" for allegedly misleading the public about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction - being run in newspapers and posted in Washington's tourist-attracting Union Station - are cosigned with Win Without War, a coalition that, like MoveOn.org, shares Fenton's mailing address. And MoveOn.org also is a cosigner with NRDC of an ad attacking Bush for his mercury policies - an ad campaign that Fenton's Website holds up as a case study of the firm's work.

To the experts with whom Insight talked, Fenton's unreported role in a campaign so close to the Democratic Party themes raises loads of questions, from the credibility of 527 issue ads to the agenda behind those ads. Neither MoveOn.org nor Fenton returned Insight's calls seeking comment. (When asked for a photo, Fenton's assistant in New York City said, "No.") Critics note Fenton never has apologized for his work for communist groups or regimes, even after brutal human-rights abuses were documented at the hands of his clients' regime in Nicaragua. "The Sandinistas aren't around to pay any expensive bills anymore, so they [Fenton Communications] had to move domestic," says Amy Ridenour, president of the free-market National Center for Public Policy Research and longtime watcher of both Fenton's foreign-policy and environmental crusades. "Once the Cold War ended, most of the hard-left people moved on to some other cause, and for a while the environment was where most of them put their hats," she says.

Environmental groups and lefties have much in common, and Fenton has connections with the funders of both. Clients listed on his Website include the Open Society Institute, founded by Soros, and the antiglobalization Tides Foundation (which has been a big-money recipient of the largesse of Teresa Heinz Kerry), as well as the Heinz Family Foundation. "He's at the epicenter of all of this," says Elizabeth Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health, which promotes sound science on environmental policy.

The left-wing money that Soros and others moved to the 527s is the subject of a recent complaint from the Republican National Committee (RNC) to the FEC charging that "John Kerry has become the largest beneficiary of illegal soft money from wealthy special interests since the campaign reforms of the Watergate era." The RNC argues that to the extent 527s engage in political campaigning, they should be allowed to raise only limited hard-money contributions, like real political parties must do. It also charges illegal coordination between the groups and the Democratic Party because of movement of employees from political campaigns to 527s and vice versa. After the RNC filed its complaint, the Kerry campaign hired Zack Exley of MoveOn.org to be its online communications director. Exley and MoveOn.org have said they will not communicate with each other for the rest of the election.

For the rest of the story, go to:

http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/...s-670128.shtml