Webnut Welfare

In a recent post at MyDD, Matt Stoller brings up the sad plight of Lane Hudson (left).

Never heard of him? He’s just just the guy who brought down Mark Foley is all, and with him the Republican House. He did it through a blog called Stop Sex Predators, where he detailed something most "in the know" in Washington already knew — that the author of the Internet Predator Law was, himself, a sexual predator, on the make for teenage boys, specifically, House pages.

When he began this work, Hudson was with the Human Rights Campaign, a pro-gay lobby. For his troubles they fired him. He is now unemployed and hard-up to pay his rent. Writes Stoller:

Lane is a hero and a leader, but he’s being treated as refuse.  Think
about this for a second.  The incentive baked into the cake if you are
a progressive activist or Democrat is that under no circumstances here
should you ever take a public risk; you’ll sully your name and no one
will help you.  Is it any wonder we have a party lacking leadership and
built on caution?

Which leads us to a discussion of political business models.

For a generation now, Washington has been run like a Carl Hiaasen novel (that’s Carl at right), only without the happy endings. Rich men (and when you’re rich no one asks how, just how much) pay big money to subvert government, and then it does what they want. This is a working business model, because whether the goal is ideological, functional or pathological, the amount you put into lobbyists, contributions and pay-offs is much less than the value of the graft received.

And for these people the Bush Administration has been the ultimate gusher.  Money has been shifted to the rich as never before, and their shiftless kids have become big players in the media scene. Jonah Goldberg — his mom was Linda Tripp’s phony friend. Bill Kristol — his dad was neo-con theorist Irving Kristol. And so on. Want to know how the European aristocracies got that way — that’s how.

Reformers, however, don’t have good business models. Most Hiaasen heroes go on to lives outside the market, or at least the mainstream, and few come back. It’s even worse for Web reformers. The left at least offers work as consultants or media contributors to people like James Carville and Paul Begala, but most Americans couldn’t pick Markos Moulitsas out of a line-up (and he likes it that way). Worse, the way to comfort even among Democrats has long involved working for business lobbies — Hollywood, telecomm, health care, etc. — which means these people never come to future campaigns with clean hands.

Given Hudson’s place in history you might say, be like Linda Tripp and write a book. But that whole business is a scam. Regnery’s crap is bought in bulk and warehoused in places like south Georgia (Exit 5 in Valdosta on I-75). As long as the book doesn’t come back it’s counted as sold. Regnery "royalties" are pay-offs.

Somehow I don’t see the Left doing that.

Then there’s the whole panoply of think tanks and Astroturf groups, which thanks to the K Street Project are absolutely stuffed to the gills with happily employed right-wing kooks.  Stoller even has a name for this — Wingnut Welfare.

So where, he asks, is the Webnut Welfare? Hudson asks for contributions at his News for the Left blog, but that sort of thing supports very few people. And in order to create an infrastructure that open source candidates can run from, Stoller says, we need to make sure that people like Hudson are at least fed, if not comfortable.

It starts to sound like one of those Save the Children ads. Why, for only 70 cents a day you can keep this poor blogger in peanut butter and DSL payments. For just a few cents more you can help him get a cappuccino and a cinnamon roll at a coffee shop with Free WiFi. Won’t you help? (Given the size of STC that’s not a bad idea…)

When movement conservatism was getting going, back in the 1960s, a few multi-millionaires stepped to the plate and established institutions, front groups like the American Enterprise Institute, through which the people who did their ideological work could live comfortable lives. But even if someone (keep your hands in your pockets Soros) stepped to the plate from the left, that wouldn’t work. The corruption would be obvious, because the Netroots insist on transparency as a primary value.

Besides, once someone is getting paid by someone, we know the second someone belongs to the first. If Matt Stoller, for instance, started a Save the Blogger Foundation, and gave grants to people like Lane Hudson, enough so they were actually buying rounds of cappuccino for the house we would assume (quite rightly) that Stoller owned Hudson, and suspect Hudson’s works henceforth.

So let me offer a modest proposal. We set up a tax-exempt Foundation, solicit contributions from rich liberals, create a board of directors, and hand out an annual set of YourNameHere Foundation grants. Figure $50,000 to start. The winners would be those whose work, like Hudson’s, was ground-breaking, or people who, in the opinions of the judges, could use that money to launch a business model paying other bloggers.

My application is in the mail…