Liberal Groups Are Flexing New Muscle in Lobby Wars

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/us/politics/01lobby.html?hp


When Newt Gingrich’s Congress was moving full-speed in its efforts to shrink the government more than a dozen years ago, Ralph G. Neas, an indefatigable champion of liberal causes, threw up his hands and declared that his side had been outmaneuvered.

Liberals who had grown up pressing their case with marches and old-fashioned door-knocking campaigns, Mr. Neas said, were no match for conservatives with big business allies and a commanding understanding of the new talk-radio, cable-news battlefield, where former President Bill Clinton’s signature health care plan lay bleeding.

Recent days have found Mr. Neas in a new perch, preparing to join the coming fight over President Obama’s sweeping health care proposals, with plans to coordinate a campaign of television advertisements, “blogger outreach” and community meetings. This time, he is supported by his own phalanx of big business backers, including the Exelon power company and Giant food stores.

“We get another chance to do it again, and win this time,” he said in an interview in his new office at the National Coalition on Health Care, which recently named him its chief executive.

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Mr. Obama can, however, expect help from several outside groups as he labors to shift the government in a different direction. The efforts are in many ways the result of planning that took place in the years Democrats spent in the wilderness — which grew thicker around them as President George W. Bush and his political guru Karl Rove built an army of influence with conservative activists, backed by big business.

Spurred in part by former Clinton White House aides seeking a return to power, and inspired by the success of the activist group MoveOn, liberals formed organizations like Media Matters for America, which calls attention to what it considers conservative-slanted news coverage, and the Center for American Progress, a group founded by John D. Podesta, Mr. Clinton’s former chief of staff and Mr. Obama’s transition director, to promote liberal solutions to major problems. With support from the billionaire George Soros and the Hollywood producer Steve Bing, among other undisclosed donors, the group became a liberal government in exile, developing policy prescriptions across a full range of issues.