The left's secret club plans for 2014, 2016
Some of the country’s biggest Democratic donors — including Tom Steyer and Jonathan Soros — are huddling behind closed doors next week in Chicago with union bigwigs and progressive superstars like Bill de Blasio to plan how to pull their party — and the country — to the left.
The setting is the annual spring meeting of the Democracy Alliance, a secretive club of wealthy liberals that’s the closest thing the left has to the vaunted Koch brothers’ political network.
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The DA, as the liberal group is known to insiders, is increasing its ranks of rich donors for the first time in years and is gearing up to spend huge sums on political data, voter registration, ground organizing and advertising to influence the 2014 midterms and 2016 presidential elections. Potentially more significant, the groups’ donors also could play an important role in determining whether the post-Barack Obama Democratic Party embraces the rising tide of progressive populismor hews to a more cautious, centrist course — in other words, whether the Hillary Clinton wing or Elizabeth Warren wing will seize the reins.
The Spring Investment Conference will feature a number of Clinton allies and others associated with the centrist wing — including Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes and Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. But the conference — which kicks off Sunday night at a Ritz Carlton ballroom with a dinner keynoted by de Blasio — is also seen as a coming out party of sorts for the group’s progressives, who have expressed some measure of dissatisfaction with what they see as a level of timidity on their pet issues from the Obama White House.
According to a conference agenda obtained by POLITICO, panels will focus on elevating progressive issues like income inequality, climate change, drug reform, gun control, abortion rights and the death penalty.
It’s not all serious business, though. Social events include a wine party featuring selections from wineries owned by DA donors, a private curator-led tour of the Art Institute of Chicago and a performance by “The Daily Show” co-creator Lizz Winstead, who the agenda says will deploy her “comedic genius” to take a “light-hearted look at the conservative Right and the decay of the Fourth Estate.”
DA conferences are typically kept hush-hush, with locations tightly held, press barred from the sessions and participants prohibited from discussing the proceedings.
Invitations are coveted by all manner of Democrats. Several representatives from Obama’s orbit are expected at the Ritz, including White House Political Director David Simas and campaign adman Larry Grisolano. They’re participating in a panel on winning health care