AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka was among the heavyweights at the meeting. Crashing big Dem donors' meeting

Some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors met Tuesday afternoon with influential party figures such as AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, organizer Joan Fitz-Gerald and former White House aide Van Jones to discuss the lessons and implications of the GOP’s landslide midterm election victory.

The meeting – organized by a group of wealthy, politically active liberals called the Democracy Alliance – took place at Washington’s swank Mandarin Oriental hotel, where off-duty police officers and other security patrolled the halls looking for reporters and other uninvited guests, who were escorted from the premises.


"The agreement is that everything that goes on here is confidential," one adviser to major liberal donors said while waiting for a taxi outside the hotel. “I didn't come up with the policy, but I think it serves the purposes of allowing people to speak freely and let their hair down,” said the adviser, who did not want to be identified violating the agreement.

Among the donors spotted at the conference on Tuesday, the second day of the three-day gathering, were former Stride Rite chairman Arnold Hiatt, hedge fund financier Donald Sussman, electronics pioneer Bill Budinger, real estate developer Wayne Jordan and Suzanne Hess, the wife of real estate mogul Lawrence Hess.

There was no sign of some of the deepest-pocketed Democracy Alliance members, such as tech entrepreneur Tim Gill, insurance magnate Peter Lewis, or billionaire financier George Soros, though Michael Vachon, a Soros representative, did attend.

The conference itself featured mostly big picture analyses of the midterm elections and their predicted impact on the donors’ favored policy causes, rather than strategic planning for the 2012 elections, sources told POLITICO. And – despite the tens of millions of dollars in independent advertisements aired in 2010 by GOP allies attacking Democratic candidates – Democracy Alliance is not formally recommending its donors contribute to any outside groups that focus primarily on election advertising.

But the source said some donors on the sidelines of the conference discussed whether they should try to match the GOP’s outside advertising effort in 2012, and, if so, how to balance that giving with their support for the groups recommended by Democracy Alliance, which focus largely on shaping policy and the media, as well as mobilizing voters around issues.

“I don't think that it's an either-or type of situation. People are interested in both of the two things,” said the source, who nonetheless added, “ Karl Rove and others on the right have shown an instinct for the political jugular that our side lacks.”

Democratic operatives with experience in advertising campaigns, including Erik Smith, a Democratic operative who worked for the Media Fund in 2004, could be seen mingling with attendees. That group and a linked organization called America Coming Together raised a combined $139 million, much of it from donors now involved in Democracy Alliance, such as Soros, to air ads boosting Sen. John Kerry’s unsuccessful Democratic challenge to George W. Bush’s reelection.

Smith – who is also executive director of a group called Common Purpose Project, which has received Democracy Alliance support in the past – declined to comment. But another operative who planned to attend the conference told POLITICO that the donors who funded the anti-Bush efforts “told us in 2004 that we couldn’t come to them every two years and ask them for $10 to $20 million.”

Democracy Alliance was established in 2005, partly to channel liberal donors’ disappointment with the failure of the 2004 effort into a new approach to giving that seeks to offset what the Alliance sees as the right’s superior intellectual infrastructure.

The thinking is that in order to be competitive in the messaging - and idea - wars, the left needed to replicate well-established conservative think tanks such as the Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution, as well as training outfits like the Leadership Institute and the Young America's Foundation.

Democracy Alliance requires its members to pay annual dues starting at $15,000 to support member activities including its twice-a-year conferences, which feature a mix of policy briefings, dinners and cocktail parties, and its staff, who vet and recommend non-profit groups to which its members can contribute.

Members are required to contribute a minimum of $100,000 to recommended groups, which have primarily focused on policy, issue advocacy and voter mobilization, and not campaign advertising.

Democracy Alliance declined to comment for this story, but last week, its chairman Rob McKay, a California venture capitalist who is heir to a Taco Bell fortune, told POLITICO: “Our unyielding commitment to DA’s mission - to build modern, high-performing progressive state and national organizations and a more vibrant democracy - has never been clearer or more urgent.”

Among the organizations represented at this week’s conference were the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the centrist NDN think tank, Campaign for America’s Future, Campaign for Community Change, Advancement Project, Brave New Films, State Voices, and union-related groups that work to mobilize liberal voters, including Working America, Progressive Majority and America Votes.

On Monday evening, big donors visited the offices of some of the recommended groups and listened to presentations from their leaders.

And on Tuesday, representatives from some of those groups and others mingled with donors before a panel about how the political landscape will affect economic policy, which featured Trumka.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, talked with Budinger. According to tax records analyzed by the conservative Capital Research Center, Budinger’s family’s foundation in 2007 contributed $100,000 to the White House-allied Center for American Progress, one of the Democracy Alliance’s earliest beneficiaries.

Sloan did not respond to questions about her participation in the meeting.

Other attendees who are influential in liberal politics and policy also milled about Tuesday, including Fitz-Gerald, president of the influential political organizing group America Votes; Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future; Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund; Matt Ewing, director of a Democracy Alliance-funded project that invests in early stage new media organizations; Philip Dufour, a Washington event planner; Eric Liu, a former speechwriter and deputy domestic policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton; fundraiser Lisa Versaci and radio host Thom Hartman.

Donors, panelists, guests and Democracy Alliance staff were all required to wear name tags identifying themselves and their involvement, and this reporter, who did not have a name tag, was ushered out of the conference after being informed by a security officer that it was a “private event.”