5 Foes of Bush Form PAC in Bid to Defeat Him
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
The New York Times
August 8, 2003
nytimes.com.
WASHINGTON — The leaders of five groups with strong ties to Democratic causes announced today that to help offset Republican advantages in organizing and fund-raising, they were joining to form a political action committee aimed at defeating President Bush next year.
The leaders said the new committee, America Coming Together, would concentrate on 17 battleground states and emphasize voter education and registration.
They also said they had received initial contributions totaling nearly $22 million of the $75 million they expect to have raised by November of next year. Mr. Bush's re-election campaign, which began raising money less than three months ago, has already taken in $34.2 million and expects to reach $170 million.
"This is a real demonstration of the coming together of many people in this country who are upset about the extremism of the Republican Party," said one of the committee's founders, Ellen Malcolm, president of the women's fund-raising group Emily's List.
The other founders are Steve Rosenthal, president of the labor-backed Partnership for America's Families, who will be the committee's chief executive; Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union; Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club; and Cecile Richards and Gina Glantz of America Votes, a new coalition of groups that support Democratic policies.
The committee is the latest organizing effort among groups that are not affiliated with any of the nine Democrats running to challenge President Bush but that share a belief that they have no time to spare in the drive to defeat him.
Earlier this week, the political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Karen Ackerman, said the labor federation's own nationwide program of education and registration would be its "earliest and biggest" mobilization aimed at driving an administration out of power.
Mr. Stern called the current election cycle "an extraordinarily unique moment in history," in which many people feel that "everything they have worked for all their lives is at stake."
Political experts say the feelings of Mr. Bush's opponents are so strong that the early organizing efforts against him appear to be the most fervent in decades.
"I've never seen anything this early or this intense," said David Loebsack, a professor of political science at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa.
The committee founders said they intended to create grass-roots organizations in states they view as crucial to the election, including Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Al Gore won in 2000, and Ohio and Florida, won by Mr. Bush.
Mr. Rosenthal, former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said specific goals would be developed for each state, like increasing the share of the African-American vote in Ohio by two percentage points over the 9 percent share in 2000.
The philanthropist George Soros, who has donated $8 million to the new committee, said in a statement that he had been prompted to act by his belief that Mr. Bush was leading the country in a "false and dangerous" direction. |
