Soros is not a Democratic party operative

Jane Hamsher did a post recently about traditional donors to the Democratic party holding back their money this cycle. A lot of people were agitated by it. It generated an hours long twitter bitchfest. I sat it out at the time, even though it irritated me too, but for a different reason. My gripe was Jane held up George Soros as the poster boy for absent donors and implied that he decided to give to other causes instead, notably marijuana reform, which her own FireDogLake only recently embraced. The thing is, Soros was never a big donor to political parties and has been supporting marijuana reform long before FDL was even launched.

I bring it up today because The Caucus posts a couple of excerpts from a recent interview.

“I made an exception getting involved in 2004,” Mr. Soros, 80, said in a brief interview Friday at a forum sponsored by the Bretton Woods Committee, which promotes understanding of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

“And since I didn’t succeed in 2004, I remained engaged in 2006 and 2008. But I’m basically not a party man. I’d just been forced into that situation by what I considered the excesses of the Bush administration.”

That's what I was planning to say in response to Jane's post. Soros' political involvement during the Bush regime was an anomaly. He's traditionally spent his money on issue based advocacy with an eye toward building a more civil society. He rightly recognized the Bush administration's policices were threatening his life's work. He's not an political operative who cares about the intrigues of The Village and never has been. That's a wingnut fantasy no progressive should be promoting.