This is one billionaire you may learn to love, John. If the election is close, he will pour an unlimited amount of money in to beat Bush.
CAMPAIGN 2004
Malefactor of Great Wealth
Meet George Soros, heir to the far-right American Liberty League.
BY ARNOLD BEICHMAN - WSJ.com
Mr. Beichman, research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of "Anti-American Myths: Their Causes and Consequences" (Transaction, 1992).
This is a story about George Soros, philanthropist billionaire and political crusader. But first some background.
The formation of the American Liberty League was announced on Aug. 22, 1934. Its backers were rich and powerful conservative business and political leaders of both major parties who hated Roosevelt and his New Deal. And "hated" is not too strong. A New Yorker cartoon at the time showed three evening-gowned dowagers in diamond tiaras with a caption "Let's all go down to the Translux [a New York newsreel theatre of the time] and hiss Roosevelt."
The league included among its founders two former Democratic presidential candidates, Al Smith and John W. Davis, six members of the du Pont family, General Motors' John J. Raskob, and William Randolph Hearst. The founders, many of them bank presidents, either had millions of their own (billionaires had not yet arrived as a normal phenomenon) or had access to individual or corporate fortunes. The aim of this bipartisan political coalition was to undo the New Deal, which they regarded as unconstitutional and, worse yet, as socialism. Between 1934 and 1936 the coalition of the right spent a huge sum for those days, $1.2 million, to get a Republican Congress (they failed) and to defeat FDR running for a second 1936 (they failed again). James A. Farley, a New Dealer, derided the league as the American Cellophane League because it was, he said, a DuPont product you could see right through.
For the liberal left, the league became a punching bag. Its leaders were what an earlier Roosevelt had called the "malefactors of great wealth" and what FDR called "economic royalists." The theme of the anti-Liberty Leaguers was that there was something immoral and conspiratorial about the du Pont family using its great riches to try to defeat the New Deal. The league became such an object of attack that the 1936 GOP presidential candidate, Alfred M. Landon, asked the league not to endorse him. It refrained from supporting Landon but this did him no good. FDR carried 46 of the 48 states.
This account is a preface to my wonderment at the different treatment accorded members of a 21st-century "rich man's club," this one on the left, headed by George Soros and his fellow "economic royalists" in Hollywood who supported Bill Clinton and who are now out to destroy President Bush. Compared with the intemperate leftist Mr. Soros, the American Liberty League millionaires were pikers, mild dissenters. Mr. Soros can declaim that "America, under Bush, is a danger to the world," an epithet that the conservatives of the Roosevelt era would never have leveled against FDR. President Bush is, of course, a danger to a particular part of the world: to Osama bin Laden (as he was to Saddam Hussein), to Kim Jong Il, to Iran's ayatollahs. But Mr. Soros says otherwise. And John Kerry has bowed his head in agreement.
Who would call Mr. Soros a "malefactor of great wealth," he who last year donated at least $15.5 million to three major liberal groups? According to the Capital Research Center, Mr. Soros in 2001 gave $132 million to domestic and international non-profit organizations. In September 2003, he gave $10 million to America Coming Together, an umbrella organization of labor, environmental and women's organizations. Indirectly these and other Soros contributions will go to the Democratic presidential campaign. In fact a Washington Post editorial has described Mr. Soros as the "new central banker of the Democratic Party." Such expenditures are never regarded as obscene by left liberalism.
The American Liberty League was condemned on all sides, and rightly, when it compared FDR to Hitler; but left liberalism is silent as Mr. Soros intones "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us', it reminds me of the Germans." And knowing Mr. Soros's penchant for transforming his exclusionary politics into a moral crusade, the Democratic presidential campaign, which will be dominated by his money, will target President Bush in a fashion that not even the ultraright-wing American Liberty League dared do to President Roosevelt.
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