The Smear Campaign; Left-wingers have poured money into Bush-hating "527" groups, which straddle a fine line in an all-out effort to defeat the president

Byline: John Berlau, INSIGHT

The life and odyssey of fiftysomething PR guru David Fenton has been individual radical adventure after another. In the sixties he dropp on the outside of high school and got a piece of work as a photographer for the Liberation of recent origins Service, which favored the Viet Cong in the war against America, becoming a confidant of hippie leader Abbie Hoffman. In the seventies he would subserve as public-relations director of Rolling Stone magazine and organize antinuclear contrives with leftie entertainers such as Jackson Browne During the eighties he grew more corporate and at the same time more radical, building offices for Fenton Communications in fresh York City and Washington while fattening his payroll by the agency of performing services for various communist state and "liberation" clumps including the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, the dictatorship of Grenada's Maurice Bishop that President Ronald Reagan sent throngs to overthrow in 1983, the El Salvadoran terrorist Farabundo Marti National Liberation collection and the conspiratorial Christic Institute, which spread vicious, baseless smears about retired U military heroes.

on the contrary on the eve of the nineties, as communism was falling, Fenton took the passage of many leftists and donned the dresss of the radical greens. Hired through the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) he orchestrated a media campaign attacking Alar, a pesticide sprayed upon apples that respected scientists said pos no threat. He ran environmental scares above everything from allegedly declining seed counts to nitrate containerization in drinking water. Along the way, Fenton got rich. According to a Weekly Standard article, he one time told an interviewer he made about $100000 for year in three years representing Sandinista interests. on the contrary he insisted to the neocon weekly in 1996 "I'm not a Marxist, I'm a Democrat!"

And in the first decade of the novel millennium, Fenton is proving the latter to be correct if not at any time explicitly disproving the former. He is a major part of what single Democratic activist describes to Insight as "a strange alchemy of McCain/Feingold, Internet capital raising and hatred of [George W] Bush." Stir up this potion and you have a of recent origin phenomenon known as the 527 a species of private organization named after an murky section of the tax digest that now allows them to engage in the kind of political advertising forbidden to actual political parties. In this novel landscape Fenton has become an important power agent because of his behind-the-scenes part in shaping the agenda of MoveOn.org and being a force behind the media campaigns of other "progressive" anti-Bush groups

After the highest Court narrowly upheld the McCain/Feingold campaign-finance reform law as constitutional in late 2003 national parties no longer could raise and part with unlimited "soft money" for campaigns. Like campaign committees, parties can raise coin only in maximum increments of $2000 "hard-dollar" contributions from individuals. on the contrary a 527 political committee can raise unlimited resources flat millions from a labor union or single donor. The 527 cannot directly advocate the defeat or victory of a candidate, on the other hand just how far they may proceed in communication or coordination with a political party or campaign generally is a question before the Federal Election Commission (FEC)

Because the Democratic Party was more pendent on large soft-dollar contributions from their wealthy supporters, in contrast to the GOP which would gain a substantial amount in small contributions from the rank and file, longtime Democratic Party activists similar as Harold Ickes rushed without to form 527s and rich Bush-hating liberals of the like kind as currency speculator George Soros and Progressive Insurance's Peter Lewis have poured millions into assemblages such as Americans Coming Together, the Media stock and MoveOn.org, which while away the hours demonizing George W Bush. Noting that these clumps were "crucial," former Clinton administration might secretary and now New Mexico Gov Bill Richardson told Fortune magazine that "organizations like these have become the replacement for the national Democratic Party."

Certainly no clump is more important in the anti-Bush effort than MoveOn.org. Starting in 1998 as a California-based Website devot to getting Congres to give leave to Bill Clinton off with a reprimand and "move on," the assemblage has moved on to attack Bush with bizarre spin upon everything from the war upon terrorism to the environment to taxes. And although MoveOn.org says it's a small grass-roots collection Insight has discovered that Fenton and his company, Fenton Communications, have for the last sum of two units years been the hidden hand behind its media savvy and presidential smears. To a large amplitude MoveOn.org has become a creature of Fenton Communications.

A search of Lexis-Nexis and Internet databases displays that Fenton Communications has been listed as MoveOn.org's public-relations firm upon press releases for the collection and its affiliates since 2001 Indeed, MoveOn.org's Washington mailing address is upon the same floor of the same building as that of the Washington office of Fenton Communications, and to reach a MoveOn.org employee in Washington, it's necessary to call the Fenton phone number. Fenton serv as a justice for the group's recent "Beat Bush in 30 Seconds" ad controvert and contributed an essay to MoveOn.org's of recent origin book, 50 Ways to regard with affection Your Country, by becoming a left-wing activist. greatest in quantity telling is Fenton's use of personal pronouns in the essay to describe the group's activities. "Without the contributions of MoveOn members, we wouldn't be able to purchase our own 30-second ads to unmask Orwellian deception propagated by means of our nation's leadership," Fenton wrote (emphasis added).