George Soros

The three most famous super-rich liberals are George Soros, Warren Buffet (notwithstanding his advising the Shwarzenegger campaign), and Bill Gates Sr. (Gates Sr. is not personally rich, but as head of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation he still makes the list). The upcoming issue of Fortune has a medium-length piece on Soros and his new book (paid subscription required). In a nutshell, the point of the article is that Soros is (1) really wealthy, (2) really smart, (3) really angry at the Bush administration, and (4) planning to spend and raise money to do something about it:

“I lived through both German and Soviet occupation,” Soros told me as we walked through a park on Budapest’s Margaret Island. “When I hear President Bush say that those who are not with us are against us, I hear alarm bells.” He calls Bush’s speeches “Orwellian” and compares the Bush vision of international democracy—”You can have freedom as long as you do what we tell you to do”—to Soviet rhetoric about “people’s democracies.”

Soros has just committed $10 million of his own money to an effort to drum up support for Democrats in key states, immediately becoming one of the biggest individual donors to next year’s electoral race. In September he staged a fundraiser for former Vermont governor Howard Dean. And after years of writing moderate, carefully argued—and not very influential—tracts about the international economy, he is now almost ready to publish a very different kind of work, a book to be called The Bubble of American Supremacy. It’s a no-holds-barred attack on what he sees as the hubris of American policy. “I’ve come to the conclusion,” Soros told FORTUNE, “that one can do a lot more about the issues I care about by changing the government than by pushing the issues.” In short, he has become the world’s angriest billionaire.

How do Republicans respond when one-who-should-be-with-them sides with the opposition?

“The Democratic party has been unable to broaden their message,” says Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson, … “George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party for $10 million”

Spread nationwide, in smaller chunks to various candidates and state parties, $10 million buys an entire party? I wonder what these 23 people are buying with their $200,000 or more in funds that will be contributed to a single person?

AB