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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (15981)	11/12/2003 10:37:12 PM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793670

Thanks to Campaign Finance "Reform", Soros is THE democrat power broker: Who Is George Soros? Howard Dean isn't giving up much by forgoing federal matching funds. Monday, November 10, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST Howard Dean's weekend decision to forgo public campaign financing is playing as a big deal, but all this did was kick dirt on an already dying system. The men really on the cutting edge of political fund raising these days are George Soros and Harold Ickes. Mr. Soros is the billionaire hedge-fund operator turned drug-legalization advocate and liberal political activist. Mr. Ickes is the New York lawyer who was at the center of the Clinton fund-raising scandals of 1996. Thanks to campaign-finance reform, these two men are fast becoming the Democratic Party's most important power brokers, nearly as crucial to regaining the White House as the party's Presidential nominee. Recall that McCain-Feingold, in its alleged wisdom, banned large-dollar "soft money" donations to the political parties. But only a dreamer, or the Beltway press corps, could believe this money would somehow vanish from politics. Instead it is being re-routed through new and less accountable channels. Meet the new fat cats, same as the old fat cats--except harder to keep track of. The irony is especially rich in the case of Mr. Soros, who has long supported campaign finance reform. By helping to limit those gifts to the two parties, the billionaire has cleared a path to make himself the biggest bankroller in Democratic politics. He's already pledged $10 million to America Coming Together (ACT), a new outfit dedicated to spending an unprecedented $75 million to defeat President Bush next year. He has also reportedly chipped in $20 million to the Center for American Progress, a new liberal think-tank that is financing the likes of Bush-hating pundit Eric Alterman. Mr. Soros has every right to play in this sandbox, but the rest of us also have a right to wonder how much his views will follow his cash in influencing Democratic policy. He has given many millions of dollars to finance pro-marijuana initiative campaigns, and former Democratic Cabinet member Joseph Califano has called him "the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization." More recently, since September 11, Mr. Soros has made it his goal to burst what he has called "the bubble of American supremacy." He has said that having helped to liberate Communist countries, he now views America as the gravest threat to world freedom. In the Financial Times in March, he wrote that Mr. Bush "deliberately fosters fear because it helps to keep the nation lined up behind the president." Other flavorful Soros descriptions of current U.S. policy include "imperialist vision" and "Orwellian doublespeak" and something that "cannot be reconciled with the idea of an open society." opinionjournal.com