Right seeks edge in 'oppo' wars

Tired of being on the receiving end of damaging stories developed by liberal groups such as Media Matters and the Center for American Progress, conservatives are looking to launch their own opposition research army to dig up dirt on the left.

In the last year, a mix of big-money Republican-allied independent groups, tea party non-profits, guerilla videographers, and some scrappy bloggers and talk show hosts has created a raft of fledgling investigative research and reporting efforts to uncover and publicize alleged corruption, flip-flops and plain-old gaffes by Democrats and their allies headed into the 2012 elections.

The effort attracted notice last month when one of the deepest-pocketed conservative groups, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies - or Crossroads GPS - launched an initiative called Wikicountability to crowd-source investigations of President Barack Obama's administration by collecting government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. As a start, Crossroads GPS pushed three relatively low-impact findings based on FOIAs - including that $3.66 million in taxpayer money was used to pay for an ad promoting last year's Democratic healthcare overhaul.

"The left is still beating the right at the game of doing investigative reporting, but I think the right has finally realized both the need and the problem," said Erick Erickson, editor of Red State, an influential conservative blog that occasionally features or aggregates researched reporting by conservatives critical of the left. "After a couple of years of thinking the right was dropping the ball, I finally think the train is moving and building up momentum."

Opposition research - or "oppo" in political parlance - often takes on scurrilous connotations that bring to mind spying or rummaging in garbage bins, but it more often relies on meticulous searches of public records and media archives. It can range from contrasting voting records with public statements to unearthing court filings and tax records, all in search of a piece of information that can be framed in the most negative light in an ad or leak to the media.

Republicans for years were regarded as maintaining some of the top oppo shops in politics, and the Republican National Committee's research operation during the 2000 presidential campaign was immortalized in a BBC documentary called "Digging the Dirt."

But outside the party and campaign committees, conservative operatives privately grumble that some of the right's independent watchdog groups - including the Media Research Center (which had a $10.6-million budget in 2009) and Accuracy In Media ($763,000), as well as Judicial Watch ($11 million), which has made an art of turning up incriminating documents using the Freedom of Information Act - haven't done enough with their research.

"They're not terribly effective. At all," said a conservative activist who has worked with research groups.

By contrast, during President George W. Bush's administration, a range of new independent liberals groups were born - from non-profits such as Media Matters and the Center for American Progress to more traditional news organizations such as Talking Points Memo - that focused their reporting and research on perceived enemies on the right.

In many cases, the information they've uncovered has been picked up by the mainstream media, with sometimes disastrous consequences for conservative candidates and causes.

"That's certainly altered the political discourse - reporters are going to these independent organizations for research and commentary based on their research, and you have candidates who are having to respond to it," said Robert Moore, a researcher with Innovative Research Group, which works for liberal groups and campaigns.

To Moore, the advent of a more aggressive kind of independent conservative opposition research in response is not good news for liberals. "The right has traditionally been the master of the dirty-tricks side to opposition research," he said, "so it's disturbing to imagine what messages voters will see when they start using the corporate money flooding into groups like Karl Rove's for opposition research."

But if anything, conservative operatives working on independent research efforts say they've encountered some reluctance to engage in the more aggressive tactics of opposition research, and a dearth of talent willing to put in the long hours necessary to make it a success. Raising money for it has also been a problem.

"A lot of conservatives think that you have to abide by Marquess of Queensberry rules even if you're in a knock-down, drag-out bar fight," said Matthew Vadum, a senior editor at Capital Research Center, a conservative non-profit that researches liberal donors. "And it's good to be ethical, but sometimes maybe you need to explore new frontiers to reflect the changing nature of political combat in modern America."

He added, "This doesn't mean we have to go all Saul Alinsky on the left, but the right can be more aggressive in how it deals with the left and we're starting to see that."

Though Vadum cast the right's effort to close the oppo gap as part of a normal cycle of political innovation and mimicry, he also pointed out that some conservatives have expressed discomfort with the alternately effective-and-disastrous undercover sting tactics of videographer James O'Keefe.

The right needs to overcome its skittishness and "start manufacturing more conservative journalists, and you have to wonder if that's going to happen, because the people who tend to go into journalism for ideological motivations are on the left," Vadum said.

To be sure, independent conservative investigations in the last few years have scored some damaging hits on favored institutions of the left - including the video stings on community organizer ACORN and radio network NPR, which were carried out by O'Keefe and publicized by websites run by Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson, respectively, and the takedown of White House green jobs adviser Van Jones, based on reporting by blogger Trevor Loudon that was picked up by Fox News Channel's stable of conservative anchors and commentators.

But, despite the platform provided for such occasional bombshells by Fox, Breitbart, Carlson and Erickson, conservatives have largely lacked the type of sustained research assault that continually develops and drives into the broader news cycle narratives critical of the other sides' most influential players.

The right has nothing to match Media Matters' relentless highlighting of alleged conservative bias on Fox News, which has gone a long way towards branding the network as a Republican organ and keeping its storylines from seeping more widely into other media. Nor is there any conservative analog for the Center for American Progress's dogged tracking of the billionaire Koch brothers, which has helped make them bogeymen for the left, or Talking Points Memo's investigations into the Bush Justice Department, http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/cats/us_attorneys/ the conservative tea party movement or the congressional GOP's talking points.

"While many sites exist on the left to target conservative and Republican politicians, there are relatively few investigative news sites on the right committed to exposing the pay for play politics that exists in today's political arena," asserts the website of a new outfit devoted to leveling that disparity, called Emerging Corruption.

It was founded last summer by Anita MonCrief, who had worked for three years as a researcher for ACORN before being fired for alleged expense account abuses http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122533169940482893.html, then taking to the blogosphere to accuse the group of corruption and the mainstream media of turning a blind eye.

The site has had a couple of minor scoops to date, including one revealing liberal backing of a net neutrality coalition that caused conservative groups to pull out. But in 2012, MonCrief said it intends to focus on the conservative red-meat issue of voter fraud, primarily by training conservative bloggers to monitor the polls and paying them for their work and expenses.

"While the left seems to be able to get compensation for what they were doing, no one was paying researchers on the right to go out there and to do investigative reporting," she said. She described her site's initial budget as "small" and largely coming from the profits of her media company, but said "we just started a major donor program and we are hoping to raise $1 million towards an endowment."

Others conservative muckrakers have struggled to raise the cash necessary to get off the ground and sustain operations.

O'Keefe last week indicated that his sting of NPR, released this month, left him his associates with some "major credit card debt." He implored his supporters "help us raise over $50,000," which he said "will go toward our next video - after we pay off our credits cards, of course."

The tea party groups Americans for New Leadership and Liberty.com this year launched an effort to expose devious links between Obama's administration and liberal financier George Soros. In a slickly produced video, a spokeswoman for the groups declared "our only hope of defeating Barack Obama in 2012 is to open an independent investigation into the potential ties between the American government and admitted enemies of the state."

But the coalition's website has shown no signs of any investigation since launching about two months ago and, in fact, a tracker at the bottom of the page indicates it had only raised $3,340 as of Saturday.

"It would be nice if there more rainmakers out there funding these types of things," said Vadum of Capital Research Center, which issues low-profile, but information-packed reports on leading liberal groups and donors such as the Center for American Progress or CAP and Soros.

Though Vadum's group has received millions over the years from leading conservative philanthropists (including foundations controlled by the Koch family, the Scaifes and the Bradleys), its total 2009 budget of $1.4 million was dwarfed by those of Media Matters ($9.5 million) and CAP ($47 million) - both of which get money through the Democracy Alliance network of wealthy donors, which includes Soros and insurance magnate Peter Lewis.

American Majority, the Washington-based tea party training group for which MonCrief also works, is sponsoring an investigative non-profit that launched this year in Wisconsin called Media Trackers, which has gotten considerable in-state pick-up on quick-hit videos and pieces aimed at what it says are errors, hypocrisy or offensive behavior by labor unions and their Democratic allies.

"We're starting to attract some attention from donors in other states asking if we are going to bring the model to their states, because the conservative movement really needs legitimate entities that fill that void with hard-hitting, edgy investigative reporting that dictates the discourse," said American Majority's Drew Ryun.

Ryun envisions a state-based network of similar non-profits. He compared the strategy to the decentralized tea party organization, which he said is similar to pitting a battalion of "lightweight, flexible, rapid response PT boats" against "these heavy battleships that the left has," such as public sector unions or deep-pocketed non-profits.

Crossroads GPS, a group with links to Republican operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie that pulled in $43 million between its May launch and the midterm election, initially signaled its intent to make investigating Democrats a key part of its mission, telling major donors in a concept paper that it would conduct "in-depth research on congressional expense account abuses."

But Jonathan Collegio, a Crossroads GPS spokesman, last week told POLITICO that the group did not do any such research.

Wikicountability, however, seems to be partly an effort to fill a similar space. The long term goal, according to Collegio, is creating a "central clearinghouse allowing a researcher to search everything that had been made public on a specific topic or generally."

But according to Vadum, it's not enough to merely disseminate information. "You do need to have somebody do something about it," he said, citing his early research on ACORN, which got wider circulation as a result of O'Keefe's sting. "You don't want to just produce all this wonderful research if no one is doing anything about it."

Tim Graham, an official at the Media Research Center, argued it's harder for conservative watchdogs to drive stories into the broader media because many mainstream reporters and editors have liberal biases. So, he said, his group has instead focused on providing its research to conservative blogs and talk radio hosts.

Though he also pointed out an affiliate of his group, CNS News employs video journalists who have produced widely cited recordings that embarrassed liberals, Graham concluded "we are a little more traditional in that we have not gone for that kind of headline-grabbing or lapel-grabbing approach. I think it's useful when it's done, but we have tried to stick to our traditional formula."

And Cliff Kincaid, Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, said he has no interest in mimicking Media Matters, CAP or Talking Points Memo.

Noting with displeasure that some of the staffers and leaders of Media Matters and CAP have "Democratic affiliations - they just come from the Democratic Party openly," he said "that bothers me because I am a journalist. I never worked for a political campaign. I make it a policy in what I write at AIM to be critical of, not just the left-leaning media outlets, but also the right."