Bloggers and Unions Join Forces to Push Democrats to Left
By JIM RUTENBERG - The New York Times
WASHINGTON — A group of liberal bloggers said it was teaming up with organized labor and MoveOn.org to form a political action committee that would seek to push the Democratic Party further to the left.
Soliciting donations from their readers, the bloggers said they were planning to recruit liberal candidates to challenge more centrist Democrats currently in Congress.
The formation of the group is another step in the evolution of the blogosphere, which has proven effective at motivating party activists to give money and time to political campaigns, especially in local races.
But it also illuminates a deepening wrinkle for President Obama, whose attempt to build a broad governing coalition — often by tempering some of his more liberal positions — has already angered some of his supporters on the left.
The new organization is in many ways the liberal equivalent of the Club for Growth, a conservative group that has financed primary challenges against Republicans it deems insufficiently dedicated to tax cuts and small government.
Organizers of the new group, called Accountability Now, said their intention was to enable Mr. Obama to seek more liberal policies without fear of losing support from the more conservative members of his party serving in Congress. But they did not rule out occasional friction with Mr. Obama, as well.
“We’re going to be about targeting incumbents to make space for Obama to be more progressive,” said Glenn Greenwald, a blogger on the online magazine Salon who is part of the effort. “There may be other times when the Democratic Party, as led by Obama, is being unresponsive, so yeah, we have the potential to push back against that as well.”
Another founder of the group, Jane Hamsher, of the blog firedoglake.com, said Accountability Now might also involve itself in Republican primary contests, though the focus for now seemed to be primarily on the Democratic side.
Left-leaning bloggers have already proven themselves influential in Congressional races, most notably providing muscle for the movement that helped Ned Lamont defeat Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary in 2006. (Mr. Lieberman retained his seat after winning the general election as an independent.)
But organizers said the new political action committee would be the start of a more organized and concentrated approach.
Ms. Hamsher said Accountability Now — which will also have support from the Service Employees International Union, one of the nation’s largest service sector unions, and the Web site DailyKos.com — would concentrate more fully on candidate recruitment on a statewide level.
“We’ve gone out to the state blogs asking them to put together research on people who they think are good candidates who should be on our radar,” she said. “We’re not just parachuting in.”
She added that the group had not yet settled on specific races.
The political action committee will formally start up on Friday. Organizers said they already had $500,000 in their bank account, money that was raised over a short period in September when several blogs solicited donations. Organizers said they expected to collect far more than that when they start fund-raising in earnest next month.
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