Discussing The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy with Author Byron York

The Center’s Corporate Counsel, Renee Giachino, recently interviewed National Review’s White House Correspondent Byron York about his new book, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, and the shadow Democratic political machine that emerged in the 2004 elections.  The interview aired on “Your Turn — Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense” on 1330AM WEBY, Northwest Florida’s Talk Radio.

What follows are excerpts from the interview.

GIACHINO:  My first guest this afternoon is a syndicated columnist and White House Correspondent.  His name is Byron York and many of you may be familiar with the work that he does for National Review.  He also writes a regular column for The Hill, a newspaper about Congress and what is happening inside the Beltway.  He has written for many other publications, including Atlantic Monthly, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and the New York Post.  He is a frequent guest on television and on radio, and I am very pleased to have him on the program with us this afternoon to talk about the recently released book, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.

Byron York, thank you so much for joining us.

YORK:  Thank you for having me.

GIACHINO:  This is really a very timely book in a number of ways.  What I was so pleased to see as I read this book is exactly how current it is.  It must just have rolled off the press last week.

YORK:  Yes, it has been out for only a couple of weeks.  It is a new release.

GIACHINO:  Let me set this up a little for the listeners.  This book is a first time tour through the 2004 campaign war rooms.  Mr. York has broken down the book with several chapters being devoted to the “key players” behind the scenes in the 2004 election.  That would include eccentric billionaire George Soros, some media folks like Michael Moore and some others who would claim that they were not connected directly with the Democratic Party.  I think this book teaches us something entirely different.  Am I right about that?

YORK:  Absolutely.  This book is about how people in groups like MoveOn.org and George Soros and the Democratic 527s, and Michael Moore and Al Franken, and Air America Radio, and John Podesta and the Center for American Progress — how they all got together in the last few years and very consciously put together a new political movement, which was really a Democratic Party outside of the Democratic Party to cooperate with each other, to get their message out, to attack their enemies, to raise money and to be essentially a new political machine that had not ever existed before.

GIACHINO:  I think one of the things that I learned in reading your book about this new Democratic political machine is that it really did not work.  One of the points I think that you make very well in the book is that they were in fact preaching to the choir when what they claimed they were doing was representing the common America.  Wouldn’t you say that is true?

YORK:  Yes, it is.  First of all, I have had people ask me about this group and they say, “Well, if these groups were so big and so motivated, then how come they lost?”  I think John Kerry had a lot to do with that and he was not a terribly good candidate and I don’t think he was going to win under any circumstances.  But there is a certain element of preaching to the choir in just about everything that they did.

For example, with MoveOn.org I tell the story of how they began.  It was 1988 and a husband and wife software entrepreneur team, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, were eating lunch in a Chinese restaurant near their home in Berkeley, California, and they were talking about the Clinton impeachment which was raging in Washington at that time.  They were saying that the Republicans in Washington were just crazy and insane.  And they found that everyone in the audience agreed with them and they all thought the Republicans in Washington were crazy.  And so, on the basis of that consensus at a Chinese restaurant in Berkeley, California — which is one of the bluest areas in the entire country, they go home and they start MoveOn.org.  It is an Internet campaign against impeachment and they get a very good response from like-minded people throughout the country.

Soon they have 100,000 names on their e-mail list, and 200,000 and then 300,000, and they become convinced that they are onto something big.  And they become convinced that they are actually the voice of the real American majority.  But the problem is that our political world — our country is so big, that the fringes are big too.  In this last election, 60 million people voted for one candidate and 62 million people voted for the other candidate.  Some percentage of people on both sides are the really entrenched bases — probably 15 million Democrats and Republicans that are really hard core and form the base of their party.

What MoveOn.org had managed to do when their e-mail list hit maybe 3 million people is convince themselves that they were the voice of a new American majority, when in fact they had just managed to isolate and find 3 million members of the isolated and very, very entrenched Democratic base.  And they all spent their time talking to each other and telling each other that they were the majority.  What we found out on November 2nd is that they were not.

GIACHINO:  If anything — and I think you make this point very well in the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy — I think they motivated the other side even more because they kept screaming and yelling that they represented the majority.  And they kept putting out all of these polling numbers claiming to look so good.  You even reference how, just days before the election, when you were talking with some of the folks and they claimed that it was going to be a landslide, basically.

YORK:  Yes, that is maybe the best story of MoveOn’s out-of-touchness.  I went to a speech that Joan Blades, one of the founders, gave and it was in June 2004 right here in Washington, and she was speaking to, again, a very like-minded audience.  And she was saying, “You know, I have been saying that I think we can win, but I think it is time to just come out and say it — we are going to win in a landslide.”  And everyone went real crazy and thought that it sounded real great, and I have no doubts that they really believed it.  It showed a certain out-of-touchness.  There is something that I describe in the book regarding MoveOn’s campaign to promote the movie “Fahrenheit 9/11” in which they actually try to create the appearance of a national majority that was crazy about the movie and hated George W. Bush.  And they actually asked all of their members to show up at the movies the first weekend because it was really, really important to get a good turnout because the national media would be watching and they would view the turn-out as a referendum on the Bush Administration.  And so they were trying to get everyone to turn out.  There’s this sort of out-of-touchness in that they were trying to create this image of a national majority and they ended up fooling themselves and thinking that they were.  And here again, they were surprised on November 2nd when the election happened.

GIACHINO:  In the book about two-thirds of the way through you lay out the different cities and major markets where the movie showed, and you lay out how the movie did and whether it fell below expectations.  As you close out that chapter you talk about how “Fahrenheit 9/11” actually had very limited appeal and his claim that it was a “red-state movie” ended up being entirely untrue.  What I am wondering is how did they get away with it?  Where was the media and why did it take you having to write this book for us to learn those facts?  Where is independent research and where was the media on that story?

YORK:  Well, they should have been more diligent than they were.  If you remember, when “Fahrenheit 9/11” premiered, Michael Moore said “this is the biggest movie in America.  Every red state that George Bush won back in 2000, this is the number one movie in.”  And the whole point was to suggest that the movie was not just doing well in the blue areas like Boston or San Francisco that you would expect it to do well, but that it was doing well all across America with Republicans who were changing their minds about George W. Bush.  The idea was to create this illusion of a wave of anti-Bush anger sweeping across the country and that “Fahrenheit 9/11” was on the leading edge of it.  And Moore’s statements were reported in the press quite uncritically — over and over again.  What I found out when I started looking into it for the book was that that was not the story at all.  I found this source in Hollywood who had access to this very sophisticated audience measurement statistics that the studios and the company’s hire to measure their audiences — they keep track of their audiences for ever movie down to who is going to what movie and where, down to a screen-by-screen level.  It is very sophisticated.  You know there is a lot of money in the movie business and they want to know as much as they can about their audience.

One of the things they keep track of is whether a movie under-performs or over-performs in a given market according to the statistical expectations of the performance of other pictures.  They gave me that information for “Fahrenheit 9/11” and it was a completely different picture than what we had seen.  Yes, it did well in New York, San Francisco and Boston, and extraordinarily well in Canada where it was a runaway hit.  Some of your listeners may not know that when you see stories on Monday or Tuesday morning about which movie won at the box office over the weekend, those are North American grosses and include Canadian grosses.  So “Fahrenheit 9/11”’s grosses contained really huge over-performances in Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver.  But the flip-side of it was that it did not do very well anywhere else.  It under-performed quite a bit not only in red states like Texas and Georgia where it under-performed seriously, in Atlanta and Dallas and other places.  It also under-performed in some of the swing states.  In Florida, it under-performed by 39% in Orlando, by 40% in Tampa, and, in the critical swing state of Ohio, it under-performed by 18% in Columbus and 15% in Cincinnati.  It was a completely different picture from what we had gotten, and it gave us in retrospect a much better picture of what was really going on at the time.

GIACHINO:  I was hoping you would name one of the chapters about George Soros something like “The Emperor’s New Clothes” because as I read what you wrote about George Soros and his followers — or minions — it really did seem like the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  Am I right about that?

YORK:  You’re absolutely right.  I ended up calling the chapter “Vanity Crusade” because I do think there were a lot of each of those words in the chapter.  Soros is probably the most important single person I write about in the book, simply because he supplies more money than anybody else and because of that he has a fairly large influence in it.  Soros, as you know, billionaire from Hungary and a naturalized citizen, never was very political.  He really did not contribute a lot to campaigns in previous years — the most I think he had ever given was about $100,000 to a Democratic committee a few years ago, which is nothing as far as he is concerned.  And then, after September 11th, he came to believe that George W. Bush was pursuing a disastrous path for the country.  Soros believed that the correct response to September 11th would have been police work, more foreign aid, America trying to get along better with its neighbors, and he felt that George W. Bush was really wrong when he used the phrase “War on Terror” and actually meant a war on terror.

So Soros resolved to do what he could and spend the money he needed to try to defeat Bush in 2004.  This new resolve of his coincided with the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, which took effect in November 2002 and made it illegal for donors to give big seven- or eight-figure contributions to the political parties.  They could not do it any more.  And the dirty little secret with campaign finance was that Democrats had been far more dependent on millionaire donors and seven-figure contributions than the Republicans had been.  The Republicans had far more smaller donors and were less affected by McCain-Feingold.  So Democrats had to find a way to keep their millionaire donors in the game, and the way they came up with was 527 groups.  That’s a technical number referring to a section of the I.R.S. Code, but it means a group that can accept unlimited contributions and still engage in politics.

So a number of Democratic strategists — and I talked with them and they explained to me how they did it — formed these new groups and their interests kind of coincided with Soros’.  Soros had actually hired a couple of political consultants to tell him the best way that he could get rid of George W. Bush, and those consultants got together with the 527 groups and pretty soon Soros was pouring historic amounts of money into it.

He spent $27 million of his own money in the effort to defeat Bush.  To give you some perspective on that — back in 1972 a friend of Richard Nixon’s gave $2 million to his campaign.  It was perfectly legal at the time but it horrified campaign finance reformers.  In fact, they made it “Exhibit A” for the campaign finance reform laws that were passed in 1974.  If you update his $2 million contribution it would be about $8 million today.  Well, Soros spent $27 million.  So something really extraordinary was happening in the last election.

GIACHINO:  Does he just go away now?  In the book you write about this sort of glib response that he gives after the election.

YORK:  Actually he was quiet for a good bit after the election.  I think the thing that is interesting is that the book was finished in January — and you know books take a little time to get to the press — and since then I think that it has become clear, in fact Soros’ political advisor was telling me, that Soros did not like being involved in partisan politics and that we really weren’t going to see him being involved afterwards.  I think that is probably not going to turn out to be accurate.  I think that Soros is going to stay in the game, and I think what we are seeing now is Soros continuing the campaign by other means.

Recently he met in Scottsdale, Arizona, with a group of other millionaires and billionaires that call themselves the “Phoenix Group.”  And the goal is to donate money to institutions that will help build the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates in the years to come, and to give them the intellectual support through think tanks.  So I think Soros is continuing the campaign today just by other means.

GIACHINO:  Do you think he will get more involved this time?  What it seemed to me was that he was willing to turn his money over to organizations like MoveOn and others to do the voter contact.  Do you think if he stays involved will he be more intimately involved with how his money is spent and perhaps maybe direct it a little more?

YORK:  Actually, I think he was quite involved this last time.  I tell the story in the book of how America Coming Together, which was the biggest of all the 527s, Soros gave them $20 million.  And when they were starting up the group, the two people, Ellen Malcolm and Steve Rosenthal — she had been head of and remains head of Emily’s List and he had been a top organizer with the AFL-CIO — they go to Soros and say they have a plan for this group and there are 17 swing states and we cannot do them all but we are hoping we can do seven or eight and increase voter turnout.  And Soros said, “No, do them all.  I want you to do them all and here is the money.”

GIACHINO:  That’s right.  And he got one of his friends to match the money, didn’t he?

YORK:  That’s right.  He dictated the size and the scope of the effort, and he gave not only his own money but you are right in that he got his friends to give other money in enormous amounts to do it.  As a matter fact, one of the things that I say in the book is that one of the largest portions of all this money came from just five people.  George Soros and his friend Peter Lewis, who is the Chairman of Progressive Insurance, often give together.  For example, Soros will kick in $10 million and then Lewis will kick in $10 million.  So Soros, Peter Lewis, Stephen Bing who is a mogul in Hollywood, and a couple in California named Herbert and Mary Sandler, who are close friends of Soros’.  Those five people alone spent $78 million in the drive to defeat Bush.  And to give you another comparison, the federal government gave the Kerry campaign and the Bush campaign $75 million to run their entire general election campaign.  So these five people actually contributed more than that to the outside-the-party effort to defeat Bush.

GIACHINO:  It is amazing.  I want to make sure that people know where they can get your book.  I know that it is available on Amazon.com, any other place?

YORK:  The way to go would be Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com, your local bookstore or you can go to National Review Online where I often post stories.  I have just posted one, by the way, on Air America, and it builds on some of the things that I wrote about Air America in the book.  You can click on the image of the book cover there and buy it there as well.

GIACHINO:  Okay.  The name of the book is The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy by Byron York.  He is National Review’s White House Correspondent.  We have only touched on just a few of the subjects that are addressed in here.  There are several chapters devoted to John Podesta and his involvement, both at the front line and behind the scenes, and many others.  It is an amazing story.  I really admire your work, both in this book and the work that you do for the National Review.  I am really amazed at the number of people who you could get to talk to you as you wrote this book.

YORK:  I think the important thing in the book is that I tried to take all of these people seriously and what they were doing seriously.  It’s not that I set out to trash them.  I was trying to understand what they were doing, and some of them were quite open and helpful and I really appreciate that.

GIACHINO:  Well, thank you.  We appreciate your time today, Byron York, author of The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy — go out and get it, you will enjoy it.