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)(Book Review)

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 ...