Unity08
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
political reform movement that sought to offer all voters an opportunity to directly engage in politics by ranking the most crucial issues facing the country, discussing them with the candidates and engaging in an online, secure vote to nominate a bipartisan alternative to the Democratic Party
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
and Republican Party
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
presidential tickets
Ticket (election)
A ticket refers to a single election choice which fills more than one political office or seat. For example, in the U.S., the candidates for President and Vice President run on the same "ticket", because they are elected together on a single ballot question rather than separately.A ticket can also...
for the 2008 U.S. presidential election
United States presidential election, 2008
The United States presidential election of 2008 was the 56th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on November 4, 2008. Democrat Barack Obama, then the junior United States Senator from Illinois, defeated Republican John McCain, the senior U.S. Senator from Arizona. Obama received 365...
. Founded in 2006
2006 in politics
-January:* January 3 - U.S. lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleads guilty to conspiracy, tax evasion, and mail fraud. His investigation starts a whirlwind of investigations and reforms into U.S...
, the group gained attention from various media outlets, with Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
Jonathan Alter
Jonathan Alter is an American journalist and author who was a columnist and senior editor for Newsweek magazine from 1983 until 2011. He is currently a lead columnist for Bloomberg View, a new commentary website. He is also a contributing correspondent to NBC News, where since 1996 he has appeared...
dubbing the group's efforts a kind of open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
politics.
In January 2008, Unity08 organizers announced that the group had suspended operations due to funding problems. Americans Elect 2012
Americans Elect
Americans Elect is an organization created to allow American voters to participate in an alternative nominating process to identify a candidate for the 2012 U.S. presidential election through the internet. While Americans Elect will have the status of a party, the candidates will be approved by a...
is an organization that was formed by many of the individuals that were responsible for Unity 08, and has substantially identical goals for the 2012 presidential election cycle.
History
The political reform movement was founded as a non-profit organizationNon-profit organization
Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...
by several political figures: Democrats Hamilton Jordan
Hamilton Jordan
William Hamilton McWhorter Jordan was Chief of Staff to President of the United States Jimmy Carter.-Early life:...
and Gerald Rafshoon
Gerald Rafshoon
Gerald Rafshoon is an American television producer and political operative. He is one of the four founding members of Unity08, and was the White House Communications Director under the presidency of Jimmy Carter Gerald Rafshoon is an American television producer and political operative. He is one...
, Republican Doug Bailey
Doug Bailey
Doug Bailey is an American political consultant and founder of The Hotline, a bipartisan, daily, online briefing on American politics.From 1968 to 1987, Bailey was President of Bailey Deardourff and Associates, among the first national political consulting firms...
and the former two-term independent
Independent (politician)
In politics, an independent or non-party politician is an individual not affiliated to any political party. Independents may hold a centrist viewpoint between those of major political parties, a viewpoint more extreme than any major party, or they may have a viewpoint based on issues that they do...
Maine
Maine
Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, New Hampshire to the west, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is both the northernmost and easternmost...
Governor
Governor
A governor is a governing official, usually the executive of a non-sovereign level of government, ranking under the head of state...
Angus King
Angus King
Angus S. King, Jr. served two terms as the 72nd Governor of Maine from 1995 to 2003. Since 2004, King has been a distinguished lecturer at Bowdoin College teaching a course called "Leaders and Leadership"; in the fall of 2009, he also taught a similar course at Bates College...
. Unity08 is attempting to leverage online technology, such as secure voting, to allow American voters to determine the most crucial issues facing the country, discuss them with potential nominees, and participate in an online convention to nominate a bipartisan presidential ticket. In an interview that aired on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
PBS NewsHour is an evening television news program broadcast weeknights on the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. The show is produced by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, a company co-owned by former anchors Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil, and Liberty Media, which owns a 65% stake in the...
in May 2006, Unity08's founders said that the group was formed in response to the polarization between the Republican and Democratic political parties. The group also cited a poll it commissioned from Princeton Survey Research and claimed that 82 percent of Americans think that the two major political parties are unable to address the country's problems and that 73 percent of Americans are in favor of alternatives to the two parties.
The group's status as a non-profit organization came into question when they asked the Federal Election Commission
Federal Election Commission
The Federal Election Commission is an independent regulatory agency that was founded in 1975 by the United States Congress to regulate the campaign finance legislation in the United States. It was created in a provision of the 1975 amendment to the Federal Election Campaign Act...
whether the group could defer registering as a political action committee
Political action committee
In the United States, a political action committee, or PAC, is the name commonly given to a private group, regardless of size, organized to elect political candidates or to advance the outcome of a political issue or legislation. Legally, what constitutes a "PAC" for purposes of regulation is a...
until after its candidates for the 2008 presidential election are named. A draft released by the commission in July 2006 concluded that "Unity08 must register as a policy committee and therefore is subject to the reporting requirements and limitations and prohibitions." In October 2006, the commission voted on the matter and declared that the group must register as a political action committee.
Unity08’s spokesperson was actor Sam Waterston
Sam Waterston
Samuel Atkinson "Sam" Waterston is an American actor and occasional producer and director. Among other roles, he is noted for his Academy Award-nominated portrayal of Sydney Schanberg in 1984's The Killing Fields, and his Golden Globe- and Screen Actors Guild Award-winning portrayal of Jack McCoy...
. Waterston discussed the organization on programs such as The O'Reilly Factor
The O'Reilly Factor
The O'Reilly Factor, originally titled The O'Reilly Report from 1996 to 1998 and often called The Factor, is an American talk show on the Fox News Channel hosted by commentator Bill O'Reilly, who often discusses current controversial political issues with guests.The program was the most watched...
and Hardball with Chris Matthews
Hardball with Chris Matthews
Hardball with Chris Matthews is a talk show on MSNBC, broadcast weekdays at 5 and 7 PM hosted by Chris Matthews. It originally aired on now-defunct America's Talking and later CNBC. The current title was derived from a book Matthews wrote in 1988, Hardball: How Politics Is Played Told by One Who...
. On June 28, 2007, Doug Bailey, the co-founder of Unity08, appeared on Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Tyrone Colbert is an American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor. He is the host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, a satirical news show in which Colbert portrays a caricatured version of conservative political pundits.Colbert originally studied to be an...
's The Colbert Report and spoke about the organization. Shortly after announcing a poll to the "Colbert Nation" about whether Mr. Colbert should run for President, the web site servers crashed due to the overwhelming traffic.
Suspension of activities
In January 2008, Bailey and Rafshoon announced that they were leaving the organization and were planning to launch a national effort to draftDraft (politics)
In elections in the United States, political drafts are used to encourage or pressure a certain person to enter a political race, by demonstrating a significant groundswell of support for the candidate. A write-in campaign may also be considered a draft campaign.-The movement to draft Dwight D....
New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
Mayor
Mayor
In many countries, a Mayor is the highest ranking officer in the municipal government of a town or a large urban city....
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Rubens Bloomberg is the current Mayor of New York City. With a net worth of $19.5 billion in 2011, he is also the 12th-richest person in the United States...
to run for president. Shortly thereafter, representatives for Unity08 announced that the organization was scaling back operations and suspending activities, citing lack of adequate funding and disputes with the Federal Election Commission
Federal Election Commission
The Federal Election Commission is an independent regulatory agency that was founded in 1975 by the United States Congress to regulate the campaign finance legislation in the United States. It was created in a provision of the 1975 amendment to the Federal Election Campaign Act...
. Unity08 was unable to resume operations prior to the 2008 presidential election.
Grassroots presence
Prior to the organization's suspension of activities, Unity08's web site was a community for members to communicate and participate via blogs, forumsInternet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
, and polls.
The movement also had a presence on Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
, MySpace
MySpace
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
and YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
.
Unity08 had leveraged the online event tools of Meetup.com
Meetup.com
Meetup is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. Meetup allows members to find and join groups unified by a common interest, such as politics, books, games, movies, health, pets, careers or hobbies...
and Eventful
Eventful
Eventful is a web service which aims to help users search for, track, and share information about events. Eventful is a service of Eventful, Inc. from San Diego, California...
for members to organize local gatherings.
However, Unity08 was also characterized, by critics, as an example of astroturfing
Astroturfing
Astroturfing is a form of advocacy in support of a political, organizational, or corporate agenda, designed to give the appearance of a "grassroots" movement. The goal of such campaigns is to disguise the efforts of a political and/or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some...
.
Goals
Unity08 had four major goals:- Enable Americans to rank America’s most crucial issues.
- Empower Americans to draft or evaluate Unity08 candidates and actively engage them in debate about the crucial issues.
- Empower Americans to nominate a bipartisan Unity ticket via an online convention and secure voting process.
- Elect the Unity08 presidential ticket to national office.
The Unity08 presidential ticket was to consist of two candidates that come from different political parties. This bipartisan team was to propose a bipartisan cabinet in an effort to end paralysis in government. Co-founder Doug Bailey explained "What we are trying to do is to create a forum for people who are in the middle who have been left out of politics."
Speculated candidates
Actor and spokesperson Sam WaterstonSam Waterston
Samuel Atkinson "Sam" Waterston is an American actor and occasional producer and director. Among other roles, he is noted for his Academy Award-nominated portrayal of Sydney Schanberg in 1984's The Killing Fields, and his Golden Globe- and Screen Actors Guild Award-winning portrayal of Jack McCoy...
acknowledged in an April 25, 2007, interview on washingtonpost.com's "PostTalk" show that Unity08 would need an appealing candidate at its center to succeed. This was in response to speculation that Unity08 was pursuing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Rubens Bloomberg is the current Mayor of New York City. With a net worth of $19.5 billion in 2011, he is also the 12th-richest person in the United States...
, or Nebraska
Nebraska
Nebraska is a state on the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States. The state's capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha, on the Missouri River....
Senator Chuck Hagel
Chuck Hagel
Charles Timothy "Chuck" Hagel is a former United States Senator from Nebraska. A member of the Republican Party, he was first elected in 1996 and was reelected in 2002...
.
Neither Bloomberg nor Hagel chose to run for President. Former Senator Sam Nunn
Sam Nunn
Samuel Augustus Nunn, Jr. is an American lawyer and politician. Currently the co-chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative , a charitable organization working to reduce the global threats from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, Nunn served for 24 years as a...
of Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
, a one-time prospective Unity08 nominee, also chose not to run and instead endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
.
Criticism
Campaign watchdog groups such as The Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21Democracy 21
Democracy 21 is a non-profit organization in the United States that works to remove the influence of private money from politics . It was founded in 1997 by longtime activist Fred Wertheimer, and is based in Washington, DC...
criticized the group's initial classification as a non-profit organization, "because Unity08 makes clear that its principal purpose is to influence the 2008 presidential election".
The group also came under criticism by political commentators such as David Harsanyi
David Harsanyi
David Harsanyi is an American journalist. He is a nationally syndicated columnist. Formerly an opinion columnist at The Denver Post, his writings on politics and culture have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, Washington Post, National Review, Reason, Christian Science Monitor,...
of The Denver Post
The Denver Post
-Ownership:The Post is the flagship newspaper of MediaNews Group Inc., founded in 1983 by William Dean Singleton and Richard Scudder. MediaNews is today one of the nation's largest newspaper chains, publisher of 61 daily newspapers and more than 120 non-daily publications in 13 states. MediaNews...
, who contends that the Unity08 ticket would have served as a "spoiler
Spoiler effect
The spoiler effect describes the effect a minor party candidate with little chance of winning has in a close election, when that candidate's presence in the election draws votes from a major candidate similar to them, thereby causing a candidate dissimilar to them to win the election...
" for one party's ticket, siphoning off enough votes from one candidate and delivering the election to the other (while failing to win the election itself). Harsanyi points to the third party tickets of Ross Perot
Ross Perot
Henry Ross Perot is a U.S. businessman best known for running for President of the United States in 1992 and 1996. Perot founded Electronic Data Systems in 1962, sold the company to General Motors in 1984, and founded Perot Systems in 1988...
in 1992
United States presidential election, 1992
The United States presidential election of 1992 had three major candidates: Incumbent Republican President George Bush; Democratic Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and independent Texas businessman Ross Perot....
and Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader is an American political activist, as well as an author, lecturer, and attorney. Areas of particular concern to Nader include consumer protection, humanitarianism, environmentalism, and democratic government....
in 2000
United States presidential election, 2000
The United States presidential election of 2000 was a contest between Republican candidate George W. Bush, then-governor of Texas and son of former president George H. W. Bush , and Democratic candidate Al Gore, then-Vice President....
that he claims may have delivered those elections to Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
and George W. Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
, respectively.
Liberal
Liberalism in the United States
Liberalism in the United States is a broad political philosophy centered on the unalienable rights of the individual. The fundamental liberal ideals of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion for all belief systems, and the separation of church and state, right to due process...
bloggers also expressed frustration with Unity08 because they contend that the group promoted "establishment
The Establishment
The Establishment is a term used to refer to a visible dominant group or elite that holds power or authority in a nation. The term suggests a closed social group which selects its own members...
" centrist or center-right politicians in the molds of Joe Lieberman
Joe Lieberman
Joseph Isadore "Joe" Lieberman is the senior United States Senator from Connecticut. A former member of the Democratic Party, he was the party's nominee for Vice President in the 2000 election. Currently an independent, he remains closely affiliated with the party.Born in Stamford, Connecticut,...
and Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Rubens Bloomberg is the current Mayor of New York City. With a net worth of $19.5 billion in 2011, he is also the 12th-richest person in the United States...
while at the same time doing little to promote the progressive values it would seemingly represent. Chris Bowers
Chris Bowers
Chris Bowers is a blogger for DailyKos and a manager of their email list. He was a blogger and co-founder of OpenLeft, and was until July 2007 a front-page blogger for MyDD...
of the political blog MyDD
MyDD
MyDD is a collaborative politically progressive American politics blog. It was established by Jerome Armstrong in 2001. Its name was originally short for "My Due Diligence." In January 2006, the name was changed to "My Direct Democracy" as part of a site redesign, with the new tagline "Direct...
called the group's supporters "rich, center-right, 'non-partisan' donors who trash progressives
Progressivism in the United States
Progressivism in the United States is a broadly based reform movement that reached its height early in the 20th century and is generally considered to be middle class and reformist in nature. It arose as a response to the vast changes brought by modernization, such as the growth of large...
and never criticize conservatives in power," and claimed that the movement has no grassroots
Grassroots
A grassroots movement is one driven by the politics of a community. The term implies that the creation of the movement and the group supporting it are natural and spontaneous, highlighting the differences between this and a movement that is orchestrated by traditional power structures...
support. Other bloggers also criticized the heavy representation of lobbyists among the organization's officers.