Crashing the big Democratic donors' D.C. meeting - Kenneth P. Vogel and Jessica Taylor

Some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors met Tuesday afternoon with influential party figures such as AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, organizer Joan Fitz-Gerald and former White House aide Van Jones to discuss the lessons and implications of the GOP’s landslide midterm election victory.

The meeting – organized by a group of wealthy, politically active liberals called the Democracy Alliance – took place at Washington’s swank Mandarin Oriental hotel, where off-duty police officers and other security patrolled the halls looking for reporters and other uninvited guests, who were escorted from the premises.

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POLITICO 44

"The agreement is that everything that goes on here is confidential," one adviser to major liberal donors said while waiting for a taxi outside the hotel. “I didn't come up with the policy, but I think it serves the purposes of allowing people to speak freely and let their hair down,” said the adviser, who did not want to be identified violating the agreement.

Among the donors spotted at the conference on Tuesday, the second day of the three-day gathering, were former Stride Rite chairman Arnold Hiatt, hedge fund financier Donald Sussman, electronics pioneer Bill Budinger, real estate developer Wayne Jordan and Suzanne Hess, the wife of real estate mogul Lawrence Hess.

There was no sign of some of the deepest-pocketed Democracy Alliance members, such as tech entrepreneur Tim Gill, insurance magnate Peter Lewis, or billionaire financier George Soros, though Michael Vachon, a Soros representative, did attend.

The conference itself featured mostly big picture analyses of the midterm elections and their predicted impact on the donors’ favored policy causes, rather than strategic planning for the 2012 elections, sources told POLITICO. And – despite the tens of millions of dollars in independent advertisements aired in 2010 by GOP allies attacking Democratic candidates – Democracy Alliance is not formally recommending its donors contribute to any outside groups that focus primarily on election advertising.

But the source said some donors on the sidelines of the conference discussed whether they should try to match the GOP’s outside advertising effort in 2012, and, if so, how to balance that giving with their support for the groups recommended by Democracy Alliance, which focus largely on shaping policy and the media, as well as mobilizing voters around issues.

“I don't think that it's an either-or type of situation. People are interested in both of the two things,” said the source, who nonetheless added, “Karl Rove and others on the right have shown an instinct for the political jugular that our side lacks.” 

Democratic operatives with experience in advertising campaigns, including Erik Smith, a Democratic operative who worked for the Media Fund in 2004, could be seen mingling with attendees. That group and a linked organization called America Coming Together raised a combined $139 million, much of it from donors now involved in Democracy Alliance, such as Soros, to air ads boosting Sen. John Kerry’s unsuccessful Democratic challenge to George W. Bush’s reelection.

Smith – who is also executive director of a group called Common Purpose Project, which has received Democracy Alliance support in the past – declined to comment. But another operative who planned to attend the conference told POLITICO that the donors who funded the anti-Bush efforts “told us in 2004 that we couldn’t come to them every two years and ask them for $10 to $20 million.”

via politico.com

Posted via email from Brian's posterous