Deja vu all over again

You would think Democratic donors would learn, but they don’t:

These organizations on the broad left are constantly underfunded—everybody scrounging to the same few foundations, which take months to decide things and then fund something for three years and withdraw instead of the 10 years that people need to make their organizations have impact.

Let me give you one telling example. As I wrote more than once during the campaign, Judicial Watch did a lot, in this campaign and over many years, to darken Hillary Clinton’s image in the minds of average Americans. They did this through FOIA request after FOIA request, getting their teams of lawyers to comb through every document, and turning up stuff that could be peddled as dirt and that informed the way the mainstream media wrote about Clinton—the assumptions made, the adjectives used, and so on. Judicial Watch has a $30 million annual budget.

Now: Don’t you think liberalism could use a Judicial Watch of its own to file FOIA after FOIA after FOIA on the Trump administration? It sure could. The group would have a field day with this guy. The revelations that would come out would make for a constant media barrage hitting Trump on ethics. He’d be on the defensive all the time.

Well—there is no such group. No one has funded it. Actually, there is one group in Washington that may be capable of doing this work, the Committee for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). It’s a good outfit. But CREW’s budget is just $2 million.

You hear a lot about George Soros and rich Hollywood liberals, and you probably just assume that liberals spend more money on this kind of activity than conservatives. Not so. There are far more rich conservatives than liberals for the obvious reason that having pots of money tends to make people conservative—and tends to make them want to invest in the politicians who’ll protect their money.

And so it’s the right that spends more. Rob Stein, the founder of the Democracy Alliance, the group of wealthy liberal donors that tries to coordinate investment in a progressive infrastructure, has studied this question for years. He told me: “The right has been building its infrastructure for more than 40 years. Whereas 10 years ago the right’s independent political apparatus was outspending progressives in electorally relevant state-based political mobilization by over two to one, in this cycle that margin appears to have been in excess of four to one.”

Lots of work to do. The Democrats have the votes in the Senate to block most things from passing, unless Mitch McConnell gets rid of the filibuster, which we’ll see about soon enough. But they’re not going to stop what’s coming with forty-odd votes. That will take millions—of dollars, and people. They’re out there. They need to be directed and led, without fear of Trump or Fox or whatever. If those days aren’t over, the legacy of the Democratic Party may soon be.

And of course, there are Democratic activists who insist in the wake of this election that the solution is … funding presidential elections with small-donor contributions. Head, meet desk.