Hillary Clinton recently attended a dinner party at the Californian estate of billionaire Haim Saban, one of her longtime political donors, where she privately announced the launch of Onward Together, a new political group through which she plans to fund organizations working to resist President Donald Trump.
The gathering was attended by 40 to 50 people, according to a report by Variety magazine, including a number of major donors who gave to her 2016 presidential campaign, donors she would ideally like to coax into funding Onward Together.
Considering she no longer holds any political clout whatsoever, the dinner party could mark Clinton’s quest to regain power, albeit from the obscure world of shadow politics. After all, George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist and democratic financier, kicked off his concerted effort to defeat George Bush in the 2004 presidential election via a shadow party with a dinner party.
According to David Horowitz, the author of The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party, on July 17, 2003, “a team of political strategists, wealthy donors, left-wing labor leaders and other Democrat activists gathered at George Soros’ Southampton Estate called El Mirador, on Long Island,” where “Soros laid out his plan to defeat George Bush in the coming election.”
By the very next morning, Horowitz writes, Soros pledged $10 million to America Coming Together (ACT), one of the grassroots activist groups through which he planned to coordinate the activities of seven sister organizations that formed the administrative nexus of his shadow party, notably MoveOn.org, Center for American Progress, America Votes, The Media Fund, Joint Victory Fund Campaign 2004, and the Thunder Road Group LLC.
The similarities don’t stop there, however. In an interview with The Washington Post’s Lauren Blumenfeld, Soros provided a motive, saying “toppling Bush was the central focus of [his] life.” Even when Blumenfeld asked Soros if he would spend his entire fortune, which was around $7 billion at the time, to defeat Bush, he replied that only “if someone guaranteed it.”
In a recent interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour at a Women for Women International event, Clinton was just as forthcoming. During the interview, she told Amanpour she was “now back to being an activist citizen and part of the resistance,” referring to a loose coalition of progressive groups that aim to stop Trump’s agenda, including by impeachment.
Though similarly conceived, Soros’ shadow party and Clinton’s Onward Together are ostensibly following somewhat different evolutionary paths.
Whereas The New York Times announced the creation of some of the elements in Soros’ shadow party in an Aug. 8 article entitled Foes of Bush Form PAC in Bid to Defeat Him, Clinton took to Twitter to publicize the launching of Onward Together, naming several of the organizations it planned to support herself. On May 15, just five days after she attended the dinner party at Saban’s estate, she tweeted, “We’re launching Onward Together to encourage people to get involved, organize, and even run for
office.” In the same tweet, she included Onward Together’s logo, which is almost identical to her Stronger Together presidential campaign logo, as well as a link to its website.
According to its website, its slogan is “resist, insist, persist, enlist.”
A billionaire hedge fund manager with a thick Central European accent, Soros was, by most accounts, hardly the ideal person to present reform to the American people, and so painstaking efforts were made to conceal his overarching authority in, as well as the interconnectedness of the organizations that made up, his shadow party. In contrast, in a series of follow-up tweets, Clinton actually named five progressive groups Onward Together would support, including Color of Change, Emerge America, Indivisible, Run for Something, and SwingLeft. She concluded that “[t]hose are just a few of the groups Onward Together will support,” and she would be “working with Governor Howard Dean and others.”
Recall that Bush’s margin of victory in the 2004 election was the smallest ever for an incumbent president, and the legitimacy of the election was also called into question by irregularities. And while Soros didn’t wager his entire lot on it, the vast sums of money he spent trying to defeat Bush weren’t for nothing: it provided a model whereby someone could quickly amass significant political power to oppose a sitting president, a model Hilliary Clinton, one of the most unpopular presidential candidates in American history, may currently be replicating.