A Party Bought And Paid For

Another in a series on George Soros and MoveOn.org

Election 2008: MoveOn.org once crowed that it had bought and owned the Democratic Party. With the Senate now blasting its tactics, that's an open question. But not, apparently, for Democrats running for president.

The Senate voted 72-25 on Wednesday to stand up for the integrity of America's leading military field commander, Gen. David Petraeus.

Everyone knew what it was really about: MoveOn's big-bucks ad in the New York Times that outrageously attacked Petraeus even before he gave his report to Congress on the Iraq War's progress.

MoveOn.org's Sept. 10 full-page ad childishly played on the field commander's name as "General Betray Us," in a pre-emptive bid to obscure any potentially positive news about the war getting out.

The Senate's nonbinding resolution was simple enough: It expressed "full support" for the general returning from the field of battle and "strongly" condemned "personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces." Given that they voted 81-0 to confirm him less than a year earlier, it was a reasonable gesture.

MoveOn's ad disgusted average Americans across the country. Even the Democrat-dominated Senate couldn't halt a vote to condemn it. A quarter of the Senate, however, did refuse to condemn the attacks, and curiously, that included all Senate Democrats who seek to become the military's next commander in chief.

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd voted against the symbolic measure. Sens. Joe Biden and Barack Obama had other things to do that day and abstained from voting.

That's peculiar. Democrats like Clinton are perfectly capable of voting against radical leftists when their stunts step over the line.

Last summer, for example, Dodd sponsored a bill condemning Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chavez, for his shutdown of TV station RCTV as millions of angry Venezuelans protested in Caracas. Clinton, Obama and Biden signed on as co-sponsors.

If they hadn't, they might have looked as though they were in the dictator's pocket.

That's why these same Democrats' failure to condemn cheap-shot ads against Petraeus is worth a closer look.

MoveOn.org is the sort of radical group that ought to be on a park soapbox instead of driving the U.S. presidential debate.

But two things change that equation:

One is that MoveOn.org claims to have 3.2 million members. These leftists represent a committed segment of the Democratic voter base, whose support is important to winning the Democratic nomination next year.

MoveOn.org claims that its average member contribution is $40. For a Democratic candidate to dare sanction the group, no matter how boorish its actions, there are consequences. Result: MoveOn.org can act out as wildly as it likes, driving the party left — and it will.

Second, MoveOn.org has gotten financing from the deep pockets of billionaires such as George Soros, who pledged it $5 million in the past and implied he would give more if that's what it took to win elections. That's not his only cause. He funds a network of organizations that have critical uses to the Democrats, such as a think tank closely associated with Hillary Clinton's supporters and ex-aides called the Center for American Progress, and plenty of others.

Small wonder that the MoveOn.org organizers feel confident to carry on. The group's organizers claim to confer with Democratic representatives or their aides in Congress every morning.

MoveOn's leaders declared in a 2004 e-mail that its cash contributions ensure its control of the Democrats: "Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back."

With a slew of senators who won't even condemn their worst excesses in a mere symbolic vote, it's hard to dispute that statement.