Democracy Alliance memo details Dem plan to "educate the idiots" and target minorities

An alliance of nearly a hundred of the nation's wealthiest donors is roiling Democratic political circles, directing more than $50 million in the past nine months to liberal think tanks and advocacy groups in what organizers say is the first installment of a long-term campaign to compete more aggressively against conservatives.

A year after its founding, Democracy Alliance has followed up on its pledge to become a major power in the liberal movement. It has lavished millions on groups that have been willing to submit to its extensive screening process and its demands for secrecy.

These include the Center for American Progress, a think tank with an unabashed partisan edge, as well as Media Matters for America, which tracks what it sees as conservative bias in the news media. Several alliance donors are negotiating a major investment in Air America, a liberal talk-radio network.

But the large checks and demanding style wielded by Democracy Alliance organizers in recent months have caused unease among Washington's community of Democratic-linked organizations. The alliance has required organizations that receive its endorsement to sign agreements shielding the identity of donors. Public interest groups said the alliance represents a large source of undisclosed and unaccountable political influence.

national Democracy Alliance founder Rob Stein explains the need for large, secretive donor networks. "We do not have the infrastructure that the right has built, yet," he said. "But there has never in the history of progressivedom (sic) been a clearer, more strategic, more focused, more disciplined, better financed group of institutions operating at the state and national level."

In the same podcast, Laurie Hirschfeld Zeller, the newly installed executive director of CoDA, explains her organization's mission. "Our job is to build a long-term progressive infrastructure in Colorado while we're conceding nothing in the short term in terms of progressive goals at the ballot box."

Zeller had high praise for the state's liberal establishment, specifically naming America Votes, New Era Colorado, Progressive Majority, the Latina Initiative, and ProgressNow as partners in CoDA's coalition building efforts. "CoDA works with all these organizations," she said.

The Bell Policy Center, a liberal think tank involved with CoDA, was praised for its work fighting to dismantle Colorado's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights. She characterized Colorado's constitutional requirement for voter approval of tax increases as "arcane."

According to Zeller, CoDA operates "in a structure that provides privacy to members." Under current law, this structure is as a taxable non-profit organization that allows individual donors to give anonymously to shared causes. She described the structure as a "fiscal irrigation system" designed to "provide a harvest later this fall."

Stein, the DA founder, said state groups like CoDA have fired "a warning shot to conservatives in America."

"Conservatives have nothing comparable to possibly compete with it, and they better watch out," he said. Colorado was chosen as a test case for exporting DA's national model, due in part to the "significant wealth" of liberal donors living here.

"It's not just individual donors," Zeller said of CoDA's financial underwriting. "One of the things that has been crucial in making the work of the Colorado Democracy Alliance effective in Colorado has been our partnership with institutional donors and activist organizations in labor, particularly," she said. "That's been a major part of how we get our work done here."