Losing Big

THE INTERNATIONAL CODE OF ETHICS in Book Reviewing, which has been ratified by every country except Great Britain, requires that I open this review by declaring that I have been a friend of Byron York for several years. But I’ve been an admirer for many more. We met sometime in the early 1990s, when a television producer lassoed the two of us together, along with several other downy-cheeked journalists, and pitched a half-baked idea for a talk show about politics.

The would-be producer was silly in the way TV people uniquely are, insecure and full of himself and clueless all at once. Over lunch, he unfurled one tasteless idea after another. As the rest of us sank deeper into the banquette, York went the other way, inching to the edge of his seat and pelting the producer with questions, honed to perfection and tipped with poison, until the idiocy of the pitch was transparent even to the man who was making it. I don’t want to make the conversation seem more violent than it was. York never dropped his customary Southern gentility (he grew up in Alabama or Mississippi or someplace similar). But it is true that the show never made it to broadcast, and his polite but relentless skepticism may have had something to do with it–just one more debt our country owes to Byron York.

After that, I kept an eye out for York’s byline, as discerning readers have done for more than a decade, through the Clinton interregnum and on into the epoch of Bush the Younger. Today he is White House correspondent for National Review and a columnist for The Hill. What sets him apart from most conservative political writers is what I saw on display at lunch that day nearly 15 years ago: He shares the polemicist’s taste for combat, but he has an even larger appetite for straight information, along with the energy and good sense to dig out facts for himself. He’s a reporter, in other words, and a nervy one, unburdened with any pronounced ideological bias beyond the reporter’s general aversion to claptrap. He works in good faith and it shows in his stories.

York’s first book–I’m assuming he’s just getting started–is a comprehensive account of a great political mystery: How was it that the left wing in the United States managed to raise more money, energize more activists, assemble more grass-roots networks, command more media attention, and receive more votes than at any other time in its history–and yet was still capable of losing the 2004 presidential election? Apparently it was harder than it looked. The feat required the marvels of high technology, the willful delusions of ideologues, the vanities of show biz, and, most of all, the unintended consequences of campaign finance reform.

It required, in particular, George Soros, the Hungarian-born currency trader who sank nearly $30 million of his $7 billion fortune into the cause of dethroning George W. Bush. Like many financial geniuses, Soros turned out to be an idiot savant: sharp as a Ginsu knife when it came to anticipating capital flows, but a dull blade in other matters of the mind, and especially in reading the political sentiments of the American public. With his stammering circumlocutions and air of vague befuddlement, he appeared in public as a profoundly unimpressive man; a Soros speech could make a Bush press conference sound like Olivier reciting Paradise Lost.

York is unkind enough to quote some of the poor billionaire’s utterances word for word. The uhs and ums and long, mysterious silences usually rendered him impossible to follow, yet understanding him was even more unsettling. Soros had a weakness for conspiracy theories and a melodramatic view of geopolitics in which, more often than not, the United States was cast as Snidely Whiplash. He really seemed to believe, for example, that the Abu Ghraib prison scandal stood as a moral parallel to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Despite his peculiarities, Soros became the most consequential figure on the left. “More than any other person,” York writes, “Soros remade politics in 2004; without him, the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy would not have been vast at all.” (York’s title, by the way, is meant to be ironic; he doesn’t have a weakness for conspiracy theories.) Of course, it’s a problem for a mainstream political party when the biggest donor on its side of the ideological divide is a wack job. But Democrats had only themselves to blame. Soros’s influence, along with that of other unhinged rich guys like the movie producer Stephen Bing (a $13 million donor) and the insurance tycoon Peter Lewis ($23 million), were a direct, if unintended, consequence of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Democrats had been agitating for the law for years, and they got their wish in 2002, when Bush agreed to sign whatever variant of the bill happened to drop on his desk. The goal of McCain-Feingold, said reformers, was to curtail the role of “big money in politics.” Its actual effect was more limited: It curtailed the role of big money in political parties by severely restricting the amount of money fat felines like Soros and Bing could donate to them.

And so, in accordance with the laws of hydraulics, the big money was channeled elsewhere, and the story of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy is to a large extent the story of how all that cash was commandeered by fringe groups on the left.

It’s a truism with which political scientists have been boring us for years: Parties moderate political passions. They discipline true believers by drawing them into a nationwide organization that is designed to appeal to the country’s political center. Without that moderating influence, the money from donors like Soros went instead to groups like MoveOn.org and America Coming Together and the Media Fund, ideological boot camps run by radicals who had deluded themselves into believing that voters hated Bush as much as they did. They spent their money accordingly–on ads, for example, that tried to prove Bush had gone AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard, and on high-tech voter-contact networks that ignored swing voters and independents altogether. The net effect of their efforts may have been to Bush’s favor.

“A number of the groups in the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy,” writes York, “were closed loops: circles of like-minded people who appealed almost exclusively to other like-minded people, but who at the same time exhorted one another into thinking that their appeal stretched far beyond the circle.” It’s possible that the party’s pros would have made the same mistake to the same impressive degree. But not likely.

York’s book comes close to being definitive–beautifully written, ex-haustively reported, seamlessly woven into a narrative that compels your attention from beginning to end. Why, it’s unputdownable! (The International Code allows one use of this word per review.) Yet York is as interested in the future as in the past. The clumsiness of the organizations that Soros and his colleagues created was the clumsiness of the beginner. They’re not going to be this delusional, or inept, forever. And they have a useful precedent to follow.

“Consider the remarkable transformation of the conservative movement in recent decades,” York writes. “Compared to the Left today, the conservative movement in the 1960s was much further removed from power, much less organized, and not nearly as well financed. . . . The Left could rebound much more quickly than the Right did.”

You should read York’s book if you want to know what happened in the last presidential election. More important, you should read it if you want to know what to look for in the next.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.