31 December 2009
As 2009 draws to a close, we are excited to update you on the substantial progress we’ve made this year in fulfilling our prime mission: recruiting fresh, vibrant, and innovative candidates to mount credible primary challenges against unresponsive, entrenched and unaccountable Congressional incumbents. The lack of primary challenges plays a crucial role in enabling both political parties to ignore their core constituents and instead faithfully serve the interests of the large corporate factions that dominate all aspects of Washington, from Wall-Street-subservient financial and economic policies to endless military adventurism and civil liberties erosions. Subjecting incumbents — along with the parties’ political and fundraising infrastructure — to challenges from within can alter that dynamic in numerous ways.
We began the year by assembling a diverse and unprecedentedly broad-based network of organizations, activists, advocacy groups and prominent individuals to provide the potential base of initial support for our recruited candidates. As ABC News wrote in February when we unveiled that network, its purpose is to put the parties’ establishments “on notice that [we] will recruit and support primary challenges to vulnerable incumbents who become ‘more responsive to corporate America than to their constituents’.” In reporting on our coalition, The Washington Post wrote that “Congressional Democrats may have little to fear these days from their Republican counterparts, but they now face a new potential threat from their own side.”
Persuading that many large organizations to become part of our campaign was painstaking and time-consuming. Each has their own agenda and set of concerns that made them reluctant to directly challenge the Washington power structure. We spent months communicating with them, persuading them, assembling reports for them, culminating in a four-hour meeting in Washington attended by their leading officials to make the comprehensive case for our project. The value of primary challenges against incumbents — once the supreme taboo in Beltway power circles — is being increasingly embraced, and our ability to assemble such an impressive team of affiliates both reflects and, we believe, advances the growing acceptability of the primary challenge strategy.
Our recruiting efforts this year have encompassed multiple Congressional districts and, with an eye towards Senate incumbents, even entire states. We have sent our Executive Director to numerous districts around the country to survey the political landscape, meet with local political leaders and activists, interview potential recruits to determine suitability and credibility, and ascertain the receptiveness in that district to challenging the targeted incumbent. In the most promising districts, we have spent weeks physically in the district and months analyzing these races and speaking with potential challengers. We are currently analyzing races and communicating with potential primary challenges from both the Democratic and Republican parties, and from every region of the country, from Tennessee, Arkansas, and Florida to Arizona and Pennsylvania.
To inform our potential partners about the viability of the challenges we are targeting, we have conducted localized polls, interviewed political strategists, and produced lengthy and detailed reports assessing the viability of each of the challenges we are attempting to mount. Primary challenges can pose a genuine threat only if they are done the right way, and most of our time, efforts and resources this year have been devoted to ensuring a highly professional and rigorous approach to choosing our targeted incumbents and recruiting our desired challengers.
Our project was grounded in the recognition that there are very substantial barriers to mounting primary challenges against entrenched incumbents, and we’ve encountered those barriers first-hand this year. Any rising local political star is certain to incur the wrath of the national Party establishment if they challenge an incumbent. Potential challenges are promised all sorts of benefits if they refrain, and are bullied and threatened if they actively entertain running in a primary. Incumbents enjoy extreme advantages in name recognition, fundraising, and institutional support, which make challenging them from within their own party a difficult task even under the best of circumstances. The entire fund-raising system and political culture is designed to protect incumbents and to make primary challenges as difficult and stigmatized as possible.
These are the formidable obstacles we have spent all year navigating in attempting to identify vulnerable incumbents, find credible and worthwhile challengers, and devise effective strategies for a successful campaign. It’s easy to find challengers, but difficult to find ones who can pose a serious threat to an incumbent. Our philosophy from the start has been that we do not need to be guaranteed of a victory, but do need to be certain that our organization’s resources and efforts are directed only to challenges that will be credible and meaningful, mounted against incumbents who are both nonresponsive and vulnerable.
We are very close to being able to unveil several exciting challengers who have been heavily recruited, supported and persuaded by Accountability Now. For obvious reasons, identifying our targeted recruits before they decide to run is unwise and counter-productive, but press reports have detailed some of our efforts in this regard. In conjunction with local activists, we have created innovative tools for exposing corrupt incumbents with an eye towards a possible challenge. As the first several months of this year is the key time period for primary challengers to commit to running for the 2010 midterms, we hope and expect to have concrete and exciting announcements soon.
We are most proud of the fact that we have done all of this on a shoe-string budget and with a skeletal staff designed to maximize our donors’ contributions. All of the work done over the past year has been borne by only three people working for AN — founders Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher, who have overseen and managed the organization, along with an Executive Director. The entire budget of Accountability Now comes from the 2008 fundraising we did from small donors who support our mission. We have purposely avoided hiring a large staff or incurring the type of unnecessary expenses typically incurred by PACs (including even office rentals) in order to make our donors’ contributions last as long as possible and be as devoted as possible to our central mission. As a result, we have achieved substantial progress with only three people doing the work, and without once having to go back to our donor base and raise more funds.
For the three of us working for AN, trying to find ways to subvert and disrupt the standard, bipartisan Beltway incumbent-protection racket is of overarching importance. In some ways, this project has been more difficult, time-consuming and challenging than we anticipated, but we are more committed than ever to this goal. There are few more important goals than putting an end to incumbent complacency, and we believe that, with your support, we have taken significant steps toward that objective.
Glenn Greenwald Jane Hamsher
Accountability Now PAC
Click here to see the 2009 Expense Report
