About Us

ReDefeatBush, the Opposition Industry and the Birth of Left.org

ReDefeatBush was a PAC that raised over $350,000 from more than 5,000 individual donors in 2003 and 2004. It sponsored "Calling Crews" nationwide at which volunteers armed with cell phones called unregistered voters to invited them to register by telephone. Over 10,000 women in Oregon and Pennsylvania were registered to vote by this method. In just over a year, more than 80,000 people signed up with ReDefeatBush as volunteers, newsletter subscribers, site members, contributors or participants in our live events. It organized a dozen events in three states between election night and inauguration day to protest the misadministration of the election and build support for a constitutional challenge to the electors of Ohio and other states.

Three new vehicles have been created to enable ReDefeatBush to continue with its mission as one of the most tactically and rhetorically aggressive components of the opposition industry:

Left.org is a 527 organization providing advocacy and community for passionate progressives. Its goal is to reintroduce onto the public agenda the political questions that have been pushed out of the public debate: Are our elections fair? Should our republic be operating a worldwide empire? Do globalism and "free trade" bring prosperity or do they bring despair? Its target audience are the approximately 13M Americans who identify themselves as left of the center and its goal is to make them more visible, more unified and more powerful.

The Honest Elections Campaign is a Federal PAC that will pursue lawsuits, publishing projects and other means to restore legitimacy to the U.S. electoral process. Its primary goal is to expose the methods used to undermine fair elections including vote suppression techniques, fraud in the casting of the votes, fraud in the counting of the votes and deception in the recounting of the votes, all of which have been used by radical conservatives in their "win at any price" strategy. Its target audience are the approximately 30M Americans who believe deliberate election fraud was a problem in the 2004 election.

Majority Media, LLC is a private company that will build and operate the Web sites of Left.org and the Honest Elections Campaign and manage the data that they collect. With these as its anchor clients, it will build Web sites, produce videos and operate mobilization campaigns for candidates and public policy advocates to help them meet their goals and to finance the acquisition of a larger audience for progressive outreach campaigns. Its aims at communicating successfully with the several thousand people in progressive politics and public affairs who purchase Internet campaign services.

These organizations are run by David Lytel, who is one of the most experienced online pioneers in progressive politics. In the first Clinton Administration he was co-developer and managing editor of the award-winning White House Web site. He ran Democrats Online, the first Internet-based Federal PAC, in the 1996 election cycle and was co-founder in 1999 of Democrats.com, the first Internet-based enterprise on the left to engage in aggressive, commercially-sponsored partisan advocacy. He has provided Internet campaign services to Senators Wellstone, Corzine and Edwards, several dozen candidates for the House of Representatives and a number of associations. A certified investment analyst, his non-political business development clients have included AOL, SAIC, Sony, Corning and other Fortune 100 companies.

Left.org and the Honest Elections Campaign
P.O. Box 65075
Washington, DC 20035
+1 202 966 0040

Why are we Changing our Name to Left.org?

Because when Bush comes to shove we'll be there to help organize an effective resistance. Intimidated by Republican post-election spin that, as usual, has been picked up and amplified by a coiterie of well-paid right wing partisan advocates in the commercial news media, many Democrats will take the bait and abandon progressive ideals in the "move to the center" the party's enemies are advising it to take.

Not us.

We find it amazing that anyone could believe for a moment Bush's post-election feints to the center, spoken with the same arrogant smirk he uses to solicit foreign allies or answer challenging questions from citizens or journalists. And yet there will be Democrats in Congress who see no choice but to trust Lucy with the football once again and who will end up flat on their backs, as has everyone who has ever believed that Bush can be convinced to compromise. Accomodation did not get him re-elected. He didn't seek a broad coalition or a wide victory but campaigned to maximize his support among people who did not cast their vote based on an evaluation of his job performance but simply to show they saw him as "one of us." All we think Bush has proven in 2004 is that there were enough people who could be convinced by aggressively dishonest rhetoric, untrue bits of divisive theater shown over and over again on television, and the admonishment from their pastors that God would punish parishoners who did not vote for Bush.

We don't think giving Bush enough rope to hang himself is a viable strategy for limiting the damage he can do. The damage he can do to retirement security through what is eupehmistically called "privatization" will never be able to be undone, like the destruction we can expect from the lifetime appointment of judges whose loyalty to the Republican Party outweighs their respect for the rule of law. There is no way to return to power by permitting Bush to play out his fantasies about the spread of "democracy" in the Middle East, or the undermining of public education, or the looting of the public treasury with corporate tax breaks, or steps to outlaw abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research. Just as Bush successfully evaded responsibility for his disasterous performance in office in his first term, so will the Republicans again wage a campaign to rally gun owners, devout Christians and homophobes to their banner in future elections. And it matters not at all that the Democrats nominate someone who owns a gun, goes to church and who also opposes full legal citizenship for homosexuals. The forces of the right will recognize which is the candidate of "people like us" and it will not be the Democrat.

The only way out is to stand clearly on the side of the "reality-based community" the Bush people disparage. At least in the period of time between now and the nuclear Armageddon the majority of Christian true-believers expect to happen within their lifetimes it is reason that will rule. No amount of death and destruction in Iraq will make it a parliamentary democracy. No amount of borrowing will set the federal budget's accounts on the proper trajectory. Making abortion illegal will raise the cost of getting one and turn the TSA into the border pregnancy police as women escape to Canada and Mexico, but it will not end the practice. Little of Bush's right wing agenda is at all workable and most of it would set the country back decades and make us even more economically and militarily insecure.

We are not afraid to stand in clear and stark opposition to Bush and his agenda, and to use every legal means at our disposal to block his agenda.

If you want an opposition that is as rhetorically and tactically aggressive as the party in power, then you should be with us.