Meet Mr. Rogers

By Ruth Conniff, The Progressive. Posted December 10, 2004.

In the face of the right's 2004 election victories and shrieking triumphalism, the Democrats picked Harry Reid of Nevada, a pro-life, pro-war, anti-flag-burning buddy of President Bush, to be their leader in the Senate. One of Reid's colleagues, Sen. Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, had this to say about the new minority leader, who is taking over from Karl Rove's drive-by victim Tom Daschle: "When the conservative talk show hosts start saying bad things about Harry Reid, it will be like attacking Mr. Rogers."

This is the Democrats' idea of mounting an opposition to the rightwing takeover of all three branches of the federal government? Let us all unite behind our fearless leader ... Mr. Rogers!

Fortunately, while party leaders are busy putting on their cardigans and practicing their Bible verses in the hopes that the big bullies in Washington won't pick on them, out in the states progressives are organizing.

Many of the independent groups that worked so hard to defeat Bush are now turning their attention to the longer-term battle to take back the country. They are modeling their efforts on what the right did in the 1970s.

Back then, Democrats controlled a large majority of governorships and state legislatures, and the Republican Party was trying to blend in behind the moderate face of Gerald Ford. Conservatives – particularly Christian evangelicals – were in despair.

That's when the coalition of corporate interests and family-values folks started working together to promote candidates and legislation at the state and local level – slowly building toward the takeover of the Republican Party, the nation, and, of course, the world.

At the center of this evil plot is a group called ALEC – the American Legislative Exchange Council. Founded in 1973 by right-wing Christian activist Paul Weyrich, ALEC drafts model bills and flies state legislators to posh, corporate-financed conferences to teach them how to push its agenda in statehouses across the nation.

"Every time I see a really, really bad idea come through, it seems to be generated by ALEC," says embattled progressive state assemblyman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin.

From rolling back pollution controls to privatizing health care to attacking what it calls a "liberal social agenda that ... pervaded the schools," ALEC has been busy for the last 30 years bringing its "groundbreaking" ideas to the states.

ALEC's charter members included state legislator Henry Hyde of Illinois (later chairman of the House Judiciary Committee during the Clinton impeachment) and future star Republican governors Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and John Engler of Michigan, who both pushed welfare reform onto the national agenda.

According to a comprehensive report on ALEC available on ALECwatch.org, "three hundred corporate sponsors each paying tens of thousands of dollars a year" draft model bills, sending platoons of lobbyists to help conservative legislators adopt and sell their ideas. Controlling policy at the state level can be almost as good, from the corporate point of view, as getting a law passed by Congress.

Today, the Republicans control most governorships and statehouses and are ramming through copycat legislation focusing on God, guns, and gays, as well as the rollback of regulation all across the country. Meanwhile, an increasingly right-wing farm team of politicians is winning Congressional races and moving up to Washington, D.C.

"Corporate America's Trojan Horse in the States: The Untold Story Behind the American Legislative Exchange Council," a report prepared by the National Resources Defense Council for ALECwatch, notes that ALEC started off by focusing almost exclusively on hot-button social issues: anti-abortion, anti-feminist causes. "In the late 1980s, however, ALEC abandoned most of these issues in favor of those that had the benefit of attracting substantial corporate donations," the report says.

Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.

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