Liberty.com will be lead by tea party organizer Eric Odom and begin its venture with $700,000 and 70,000 members. Liberty.com aims to top MoveOn

A new conservative group created to harness the energy of the tea party into a national financial force has set a lofty goal for itself: match or eclipse the influence of MoveOn.org in campaigns across the country.

Liberty.com plans to launch its independent expenditure political committee Sept. 1, with the intention of becoming an all-encompassing conservative grass-roots organization that weighs in on federal and state political races and issue-oriented movements.


Launching under the umbrella of the group Americans for New Leadership, Liberty.com will be led by tea party organizer Eric Odom and begin its venture with $700,000 and 70,000 members, according to a spokesman. Odom previously built conservative coalitions under the American Liberty Alliance and The Patriot Caucus.

“We’re looking to compete directly with MoveOn.org. We’re looking to be a player for a long time. No one else on the right is doing what we’re doing,” said Liberty.com spokesman Yates Walker, who remains a consultant on Christine O’Donnell’s U.S. Senate campaign in Delaware.

The new website is expected to include a hybrid of podcasts, blog entries and news items, as well as a fundraising component that will make it easy for activists to donate to a cause. The first line of the group’s mission statement reads: “to keep the right honest, the press nervous, and the left unpopular and out of power.”

"For years, Moveon.org has directed millions of activist dollars to influence races and to defame targets like Gen. David Petraeus," Odom said in a statement. "With Liberty.com, the conservative grass-roots will be able to fight back."

The group’s sister organization, Americans for New Leadership, has already made its imprint in the Nevada Senate race, spending $250,000 on an ad defending Republican nominee Sharron Angle’s position on Social Security and tarring Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as “desperate, dirty and dishonest.”

"Nevada may have been purple in 2008," said Odom. "But the last two years have moved them to the right. Harry Reid may be the last to learn that his policies have helped turn his home state red."

Just as important as the fundraising apparatus necessary to flex its muscle in races will be Liberty.com’s goal of organizing the sometimes disparate factions of the tea party, giving groups on the right a one-stop hub to strengthen their impact.

“Say a tea party in Richmond, Va., wants to do an ad or throw an event, we’ve got lists of hundreds of thousands of people in that area and can make it larger and stronger,” said Walker.

A separate political action committee launched by Odom late last year folded after raising just $13,000.

January’s Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which struck down the law banning corporate spending in elections, paved the way for the new group’s formation, Walker said.