This spring, after a vicious internecine battle, two of the state’s most successful liberal political-action groups collapsed: the Maine Citizen Leadership Fund (MCLF) and the closely allied Dirigo Alliance. Now, an embryonic coalition called the Blueprint Project, the birth of which is shortly to be officially announced, intends to fill the vacuum on the left. It is a creation of the Proteus Fund, a Massachusetts foundation, which has made a commitment of $800,000 for the first year’s operation and intends to continue a degree of funding for years.
But Proteus and the Blueprint Project arrive in Maine with heavy baggage. People on one side of the MCLF-Dirigo struggle see Proteus as partly responsible for the death of the two organizations.
Proteus also has tried to enforce secrecy about the project that seems opposed to its own belief — as its Web site home page states — that “lasting social change can occur only when people participate in an open, political process.” Extracting information about Blueprint has been a reporter’s nightmare. Proteus and the groups involved could have been emulating the “on message” media-manipulation discipline of the Bush White House — in fact, they may have been.
And Proteus has brought together odd bedfellows. Cautious organizations like the Maine Educational Association (the teachers’ union) and the Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM) are in a partnership with several freedom-of-choice and gay-rights groups, and aggressive left-wing outfits like the Maine People’s Alliance.
A “really big” deal
The Blueprint Project is “really big,” says Sarah Standiford, the project’s spokeswoman and director of the Maine Women’s Lobby in Augusta — “much, much larger” than picking up Dirigo’s and MCLF’s pieces.
Blueprint includes more than 40 groups, she says, including her organization and the American Association of Retired Persons, Common Cause, Environment Maine, the Maine AFL-CIO, the Maine Center for Economic Policy, Maine Equal Justice (it promotes gay rights), and Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. No new, separate organization is planned; the people employed will be consultants or be “hosted” by existing groups, with Blueprint paying their salaries. Michael Barndollar of Portland, a consultant development director, has become the first person hired.
Opposition to the citizen-initiated Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), a conservative tax and spending cap on the November ballot, is an immediate task. “Equal rights for all people” and “justice” are words Standiford uses to describe the project’s overarching goals. And “‘reproductive rights’ is part of the agenda,” she says.
A “Maine Blueprint Executive Summary” leaked to the Phoenix — and confirmed by Standiford as from her group — adds “affordable health care” and “innovative tax equity” as Blueprint issues. It has good words for Democratic Governor John Baldacci’s controversial Dirigo Health plan — even though many progressives, like Pat LaMarche, the Green Independent gubernatorial candidate, find the plan ill-conceived and insufficient in improving access to health insurance. Blueprint activities discussed in the document include polling, focus groups, media campaigns, and the creation of computerized voter lists and a Web site.
Proteus similarly has begun to reorganize Wisconsin’s progressive groups through another Blueprint Project. In June, the Milwaukee Journal reported that the effort originated in an appreciation that “the organized Left” needs “to emulate the long-term thinking, collaboration, and discipline of the organized right.”
