$40M to be spent labeling John "McSame"

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David Brock, Dems plan $40M hit on McCain

Wealthy Democrats are preparing a four-month, $40 million media campaign centered on attacks on Sen. John McCain. And it will be led by David Brock, the former investigative reporter who first gained fame in the 1990s as a right-wing, anti-Clinton journalist.

The planned campaign is the product of a shakeup in the top ranks of the struggling independent Democratic groups. Brock, now best known as the ex-conservative founder of the liberal group Media Matters, last month quietly assumed the chairmanship of what's expected to be the main vehicle for independent Democratic attacks on McCain, now called Progressive Media USA.

The move comes after the groups that had been expected to spearhead attacks on McCain — the Fund for America and Progressive Media USA's previous incarnation, the Campaign to Defend America — failed to raise the money needed to dent McCain's armor.

"We're a little behind where we need to be," he said.

But after a dinner Tuesday night at the Manhattan apartment of liberal megadonor George Soros, at which Brock and consultant Paul Begala laid out the group's plans, Brock said his group now has commitments worth $7.5 million — almost twice what the Fund for America is expected to report raising in the first quarter of this year. He said the group would begin running ads before it meets its $40 million goal.

Brock suggested that the group could do the work of a press corps that, he says, has "fallen down on the job" when it comes to McCain.

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"A void that might be filled, while the Democrats fight it, out by the press is not going to be filled, because the press is in love with John McCain," Brock said in an interview at the Regency Hotel in Manhattan. "It's what McCain is allowed to say without being challenged by facts that will show him to have said something different in the past."

Brock's most recent book is called "Free Ride: John McCain and the Media." 

Brock wouldn't detail Progressive Media USA's strategy, and stressed that — as required by his group's nonprofit status — the spending would be on a mix of direct electoral politics and issue ads with no direct connection to the race.

But he said he's scrambling to raise "a few million" dollars more this month to get ads on the air — ads which have already been drafted for the group by a number of Democratic consulting firms.

"There's a sense of urgency, and people want to go, and we want to go, and the question is bringing the money in to say we're ready to go," he said.

Brock's remarkable emergence as a leader of the Democratic Party's shadow campaign efforts marks a milestone in a long personal journey that began in the early 1990s with the notoriety he gained from magazine stories written for The American Spectator, a conservative monthly. Among his controversial articles was one alleging that Bill Clinton had used Arkansas state troopers to facilitate his philandering, a piece that set the wheels in motion for Paula Jones to file suit against Clinton for sexual harassment. In 1993, Brock authored "The Real Anita Hill," a critical book about the woman who accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.

Brock later apologized to Clinton in a public letter and broke publicly with the conservative movement. He wrote about his disillusionment in his 2002 memoir "Blinded by the Right," and Hillary Rodham Clinton later helped him establish Media Matters, which criticizes reporters for alleged right-wing "misinformation."

Brock is now seen in political circles as closer to Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign than to Sen. Barack Obama's, but Brock said he has already met with former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a close Obama ally.

"This is a unity play," Brock said.

Donors had begun to complain that while the Campaign to Defend America had built a large organization — it has, Brock said, 29 staffers, most devoted to "research" — it had failed to show it could mount a large-scale media campaign.

The Campaign to Defend America aired a single ad called "McSame" in small markets in Ohio and Pennsylvania and ran polls after it aired to test its impact.