Soros, Inc.

The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President-and Why They'll Try Even Harder Next Time, by Byron York (Crown Forum, 277 pp., $26.95)

BYRON YORK, of course, is NATIONAL REVIEW's White House correspondent, a fact that we--as citizens--should be grateful for, but which also presents challenges to the reviewer of his work herein--namely, me. Because if The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy (the title is ironic) were a dud, it would be embarrassing for everyone involved to expose it as such in these pages. When such a scenario occurs, the reviewer often contorts himself to navigate around a book's ragged edges, and to offer encouragement and praise. Fortunately I don't have such problems: York's book is a gem.

It's a gem because it eschews name-calling and sloganeering in favor of reporting and storytelling. And what a story--how, within two years, a group of Democratic operatives, allied with fringe elements of the Left, built an effective and durable fundraising machine that raised hundreds of millions of dollars, all outside the traditional Democratic-party structure. Those Democrats handed the cash to--you guessed it--other Democrats, who in turn used it to build various institutions devoted to unseating George W. Bush. Bush survived the onslaught, of course, but so did the Democrats. Today American political speech is littered with the names of their creations: MoveOn, America Coming Together, the Media Fund, the Center for American Progress, Air America. Toward the end of his book York argues, correctly, that we will be repeating such names for years to come.

The Democrats' feverish activity had two causes: one specific, the other general. The specific cause was President Bush. His twang, his malapropisms, his swagger, his pedigree, his cunning, his religion, but most of all his success had stirred up deep swells of hatred among liberals, who placed him in the pantheon of historical figures somewhere between Jefferson Davis and Idi Amin. Bush was the "most dangerous president ever," it was said, and therefore the 2004 presidential election was "the most important election of our lifetimes." Bush-hatred ran so deep, and proved so lucrative, that it prompted Democrats and lefties to act like their sworn enemies: Republicans.

Which brings us to the general cause. After their resounding defeat in the 2002 midterm elections it was fashionable among liberal Democrats to blame the party's shellacking on what one writer called the "Republican Noise Machine." When liberals looked at the political scene they saw a clique of Republican foundations--Scaife, Olin, Bradley--supporting conservative think tanks and publications, which employed a small band of scholars and writers whose work was read aloud on Rush Limbaugh's radio program and who appeared on Fox News accompanied by an army of sound-bite-packing blondes. Thus the "radical, right-wing" politics of a few eccentric billionaires were transmitted to the American public, stoking the electorate's anger and rousing it to rebellion against "liberal elites." Naturally the liberal elites were terrified. But they were also fascinated, and, awed at the conservative movement's dazzling complexity and apparent success, saw in the eyes of Rush Limbaugh faint glimmerings of Democratic revival. The key to success, liberals argued, was to create a noise machine of their own. All they needed was a crazy billionaire.

Luckily one was on hand. The Hungarian-born George Soros is a billionaire many times over-his net worth is estimated at $7 billion-and, as with other billionaires, his politics are the result of never having had anyone disagree with him. Soros made his fortune as a commodities trader, which is to say he made his fortune devaluing foreign countries' currencies, in particular the Russian ruble and the British pound. Not so long ago he wreaked global economic havoc. But in the late 1990s he had a change of heart, disavowing capitalism in favor of philanthropy. His Open Society Institute campaigned for democracy in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and for marijuana legalization and campaign-finance reform in the United States. The institute's grants to the Alliance for Better Campaigns, Common Cause, the Center for Public Integrity, New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice, and Public Campaign--by York's estimate, a total of $7 million--helped pass the McCain-Feingold act of 2002, which banned unlimited contributions to political parties and pledged to take big money out of politics forever. Around the time that President Bush began his reelection campaign, however, Soros decided that big money in politics might be a good thing after all. He announced that the Open Society Institute would shift its resources from promoting democracy abroad to saving democracy at home--saving democracy, in other words, from George W. Bush.

The sums involved were enormous. To start, Soros donated $10 million to America Coming Together, a get-out-the-vote operation run by longtime Democratic activists, and another $2.5 million to antiwar MoveOn.org's fundraising arm. But this was only the beginning. By the end of the 2004 campaign, York writes, "Soros alone had given $20 million." Which may sound like a lot of money. Yet Soros's total contribution was less than a sixth of the $141 million America Coming Together raised in total, and about a third of the $60 million raised by the Media Fund, which made anti-Bush television ads. Who helped Soros raise such enormous sums? The insurance magnate Peter Lewis, for one; the Hollywood producer Steven Bing, for another. Each contributed over $10 million. But they were joined by others, like Massachusetts businessman Terry Ragon and heiress Linda Pritzker, who contributed $3 million each.

If Soros and company had a sense of irony they would have privately smiled when they wrote checks to unseat Bush, for they had just stopped writing checks to enact campaign-finance reform only months before. They were living examples of the law of unintended consequences; McCain-Feingold was the law, and they--the people pouring hundreds of millions into unregulated "527" groups--were its consequences. Although Bush won reelection in the end, the money liberals had spent to defeat him was a solid investment. For in the effort to reclaim the country from conservatives, they had discovered a strange and exotic new species of political animal: the liberal base.

"Base" is political jargon used to describe a politician's or party's core supporters--or at least it used to be jargon. Over the last few years politics has turned into a self-referential and darkly funny postmodern pageant, in which hobbyists quibble over such neologisms as "electability" and "message." "Base" has been mainstreamed along with those other terms, and "satisfying the base" has become a top priority for many politicians. "Base," however, also means "having or showing little or no honor, courage, or decency; mean; ignoble"--and the word in this sense certainly fits many of the political die-hards, who can be peevish and truculent, prone to conspiracies, quick to hate and slow to forgive. On the left, think Michael Moore. York introduces us to Mark Crispin Miller, a media-studies professor at New York University; Miller, too, is pretty sure that the Bush administration is secretly plotting the overthrow of the Constitution and the establishment of a theocracy, which makes him, in the eyes of fellow academics, a moderate.

As York writes, the "Vast Left Wing Conspiracy" was tiny: "MoveOn was a 2.5 million member closed loop"; documentarian Robert Greenwald's films were "the cinematic version of an impassioned conversation among like-minded, true-blue, somewhat marginalized Democrats in San Francisco, Monterey, Los Angeles, and New York"; America Coming Together was "about squeezing just a little more juice out of a lemon that had been nearly squeezed dry in the past." Dimly I remember conversations last fall with Democratic strategists who said a Kerry victory was assured because the Democratic base was "the most energized it's ever been." Turns out they were half right; the base was indeed energized, and like an active chemical compound it bubbled, fizzed, gave off light and a lot of smoke. Little did the Democrats know that the compound was inert, that behind the smoke was nothing but a small group of obsessives, talking feistily but only to one another.

Mr. Continetti is a staff writer for The Weekly Standard.