Groups Flourish in Opposition
Published on
October 5, 2009
By Shawn Zeller | CQ Politics
It wouldn’t seem that conservatives have much to be happy about these days, with a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic majority in Congress. But in one sense, these are the best of times for conservative activists, who have found that the specter of government-managed health insurance, restrictions on carbon emissions and higher taxes are riling the faithful.
“If you can’t double the size of your organization this year, you are doing something wrong,” says Richard Viguerie, a pioneer of the conservative movement and direct mail fundraising in the 1980s.
The Democratic agenda — or the agenda as interpreted by Viguerie and other conservative activists and talk-radio hosts — has provided a rallying cry for such formerly obscure groups as Americans for Limited Government, which has ties to the Libertarian Party and the term limits movement, and Americans for Prosperity, which grew out of the now-defunct think tank backed by industry called Citizens for a Sound Economy.
It has also sparked some conservative entrepreneurship in the form of new activist groups, such as Resurgent Republic, which Ed Gillespie, a former national GOP chairman and counselor to President George W. Bush , started last spring to help conservative politicians track public opinion.
Bob Adams, who founded the new League of American Voters, which was formed this summer to oppose the health care overhaul, says he managed to raise $1.5 million in just a few weeks of operation. “It’s really amazing,” he says. “We have received stacks and stacks of letters. They’re all sending money.”
Ad hoc coalitions are in vogue too, from the Coalition to Protect Patients’ Rights, spearheaded by former American Medical Association President Donald Palmisano, to the Health Coalition on Liability and Access, which represents physicians’ groups pushing for limits on medical malpractice lawsuits.
Meanwhile, the debate over how best to deal with global warming — or whether to deal with it at all — has sparked similar enthusiasm among conservative and business activists. Coal companies have formed the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, for example, while the industry-backed Consumer Energy Alliance has started the Secure Our Fuels campaign to rally conservatives against efforts to restrict carbon emissions.
Overall, liberals have dismissed the organizing as AstroTurf advocacy — meaning it has artificial grass roots. The new groups, they say, are nothing more than a few business- backed activists pretending to speak for broader constituencies. Because IRS rules protect the groups’ membership and fundraising information, the truth is not clear.
What’s happening, either way, is a fundamental reorganization of the advocacy arena, says Michael Heaney, a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who specializes in interest group lobbying. “Organizing in support of something and organizing against are fundamentally different political tasks,” he says. “Democratic and progressive interests are reorganizing to be supporters of reform, and conservatives to be opponents.”