Ascent of a Woman

By Greg Sargent, The American Prospect. Posted December 2, 2004.

Editor's Note: This piece originally appeared on the American Prospect as "The Next Phyllis Schlafly."

With the attention of the political world now turning to the 2006 midterm elections, the GOP is already preparing one facet of their strategy: They're hoping to use the looming battles over judicial nominations to rile up their evangelical base and to paint Democrats as liberal obstructionists determined to block President George W. Bush's choices at any cost.

Here's a name you'll hear more and more when that strategy kicks into high gear: Kay Daly. A blond, 38-year-old Virginia woman who describes herself, with disingenuous self-deprecation, as a "stay-at-home mom," Daly heads a four-year-old conservative group called Coalition for a Fair Judiciary. The organization's goal is to boost judicial candidates she deems worthy, which coincide rather overwhelmingly with the ones Bush deems worthy. During Bush's first term, her dogged advocacy for the president's judicial picks largely passed under the radar of the biggest mainstream media outlets, but her zeal won applause from the conservative establishment. American Conservative Union President David Keene recently described her as "the next Phyllis Schlafly."

Now Daly is poised to rise ever higher in the conservative firmament. While GOP strategists see upcoming judicial battles as key to expanding their electoral majority, hardcore conservatives see these struggles in stark ideological terms – particularly the inevitable fights over nominations to the Supreme Court. Flush from election day gains, these activists see the courts as unconquered territory: the last redoubt of the left, the final frontier in their Holy War on liberalism. Making headway on that front is now mission No. 1 among right-wingers, and Daly's activities will be central to their hopes for success.

Daly is already sounding the conservatives' post-election battle cry – and, in the process, she's offering an early glimpse of the GOP's plan to use judicial issues as a wedge in the run-up to the midterms. Her pitch is based on a standard-issue set of distortions and coded-references to East and West Coast elites: Democratic senators who oppose Bush's nominations are merely doing the bidding of liberal groups, like People for the American Way, who are funded by a shadowy consortium of trial lawyers, unions, and Hollywood celebrities. This alliance of Dems and liberal organizations, well aware that they're getting clobbered in the electoral arena, are using the courts to block GOP advances on moral issues like abortion and gay rights. What's more, Daly warns, Democrats continue doing the bidding of these groups at their peril.

This line may not be wholly original, but Daly is fast becoming its most vocal proponent in the mainstream media – particularly now that it's become clear that judicial issues helped the GOP make gains on election day. On Nov. 4 – barely 24 hours after Bush's victory and former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's defeat – CNBC's Capital Report invited her on the show to offer the right's interpretation of the Democratic debacle. Daly immediately blamed Daschle's defeat on his "obstruction" of Bush's judicial picks. His loss, she said, was "a warning to those who are out there who are following in Senator Daschle's footsteps." She added a vaguely menacing coda: "I think there are going to be a lot of nervous senators who are up in 2006."

What enables Daly to issue such Sopranos-esque refrains? Does she command a mob of grassroots volunteers, ready to spring into action the moment she fingers an offending senator? Or is she a one-woman operation, a political operative who, simply by getting gullible reporters to quote her as president of a formidable-sounding "coalition," creates an illusion of grassroots support for Bush's nominees?

In interviews and on the coalition's Web site, www.fairjudiciary.com, Daly describes the group as comprising "more than 75 grassroots organizations dedicated to supporting qualified, capable federal judicial nominees." In an e-mail, Daly told me that the groups include Americans for Tax Reform, the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition, and a number of others. Asked to name the group's top dozen donors, she said the organization hadn't focused on fundraising in the past but hoped to raise between $500,000 and $1 million in the coming year, mainly from small donors.

Ms. Daly also concedes that her group's staff now consists of "just me." And as is true with so many other "grassroots" groups on the right, it's impossible to know just how much clout the "coalition" she presides over actually wields.

The right has done something incredibly smart in recent years: They've recognized that by merely making a group sound powerful, they can eventually make it become powerful. That's why these organizations lend their name to Daly's coalition: It allows her to describe herself as the head of an impressive-sounding coalition of "75 groups." That designation enables her to get quoted in mainstream media outlets (she's graced CNN, The Washington Post, The Hill, and many others, often described exactly as she describes herself); that, in turn, inflates the organization's importance to the point at which Democratic senators in red-hued districts quake at the sound of her voice. Or, at least, such is the goal. What the right understands better than the left is that power flows from the mere perception of power.

Greg Sargent is a contributing editor at New York magazine.

Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Greg Sargent, "The Next Phyllis Schlafly", The American Prospect Online, Nov 24, 2004. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Rights and Liberties! Sign up now »