Posted on 08/25/2004 4:08:56 AM PDT by kattracks
(CNSNews.com) - No sooner had George Soros vanished from the media spotlight when another liberal billionaire stepped up to the microphone. Yesterday it was John Sperling's turn to offend Republicans by disparaging everything about the so-called red states.
The 83-year-old Democrat and John Kerry supporter released his book, "The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America," which chronicles a winning strategy for Democrats, according to Sperling. Ignore conservative values, he advises, and return to the days of FDR's liberalism.
Sperling, who unsuccessfully tried to clone his dog but had more luck with his pet cat, appeared on the U.S. political scene several weeks ago when he began running newspaper ads that divided America into "retro" and "metro" camps.
The cool and hip metropolitans -- represented by Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Michael Moore -- always come out on top of their retro counterparts - President Bush, Newt Gingrich and Mel Gibson -- at least in Sperling's world view.
"The Republican Party under its current leadership protects the interests of its crony capitalist benefactors in Retro America and the rich in general," according to the book. "To a large extent, this political agenda is backward-looking and inappropriate to the interests of the people living in Metro America."
Among the other differences: Sperling says there are 245 Nobel laureates residing in metro states and just 23 in retro states. Metro states pay substantially more in taxes, yet retro states end up getting more in federal subsidies. The tiny retro states (with 35 percent of the population) have greater control over the presidential election than the substantially more populous metro states.
Sperling is spending $2 million of his own fortune on the retro vs. metro campaign, but he insists he's not trying to divide America any more than it's already split. He uses the familiar red state vs. blue state map, except he defines 25 states as retro and 25 as metro.
He wants Democrats to take his advice by proposing ideas like universal health care, universal child care, universal pre-school and universal school lunches. He said those ideas alone would win over 16 million women who otherwise wouldn't vote.
But those items weren't on display the Democratic National Convention last month, and it's unclear if Kerry will divert from his terrorism and economic agenda to focus on those domestic issues.
Part of the problem, according to Sperling and his associates, is that moderate Democrats are resisting the liberal agenda. Sperling and a colleague repeatedly ridiculed the centrist Democratic Leadership Council nearly as much as they attacked the GOP at Tuesday's press conference.
"In other words," Sperling said at the conclusion of his remarks, "the Democrats have to get rid of the DLC, they've got stop triangulating and they've got to figure out who the hell they are."
The DLC's policy director, Ed Kilgore, doesn't see things quite the same way. Kilgore said Sperling fails to recognize that not all states, or all Americans for that matter, can be easily lumped into two camps.
"The book fails to acknowledge that there are 10 to 13 states that fall in between metro and retro America," Kilgore said. "Winning a presidential election requires winning a majority of those."
Meanwhile, Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson didn't mince words when responding to Sperling's attack on the GOP-dominated "retro" states.
"The ads are extremely condescending for those of us who happen to come from the Midwest or from the South," Iverson said. "Their ads further attempt to divide America rather than bring it together. It's a message that the American people will reject."
While Sperling and his associates are more in line with the MoveOn.org wing of the left -- the same Fenton Communications folks who helped build the MoveOn powerhouse are handling his campaign -- he's also a loyal Kerry supporter.
He proudly boasted Tuesday about helping raise $750,000 for Kerry earlier this year. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Sperling personally has given $117,000 to Democrats or left-leaning causes just in the 2004 election cycle. Kerry received his $2,000 donation on May 27.
According to the Boston Globe, Sperling has teamed with Soros to fund ballot initiatives that would legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes.
And like Soros, the billionaire Sperling has no problem spreading his money around. He made his fortune -- estimated by Forbes at $1.2 billion last year -- by creating the for-profit University of Phoenix. In recent years, he's poured some of his money into the failed attempt to clone his dog.
Now he wants to change the course of history by handing the Democrats a playbook for the 2004 election. But considering Kerry's distance from Soros -- his ideas, not his money -- the campaign seems likely to take a pass on Sperling's plan.
(Robert B. Bluey is a staff writer for CNSNews.com.)
The Left is not only wrong....it's just plain weird.
More like Hetero vs. Metro
Sperling is on my local Fox affiliate (WGHP-Fox 8, High Point, NC) spewing his leftist gargage, unchallenged by the anchors, of course. Email to the station in the works.
Such original ideas.
"gargage" should have been "garbage", lol.
How ironic then, that the fashions and fads the Metro-types love to follow are just a remix of eras gone by. You see it in clothing and in music. The sixties, the seventies, now the eighties are popping up all over the place. Retro is chic- just ask any Metro.
I'm sorry. I don't understand this. Is he saying that Retro America are all a bunch of backward, uneducated hicks, or that it's full of rich capitalists? Don't they have capitalism in the big cities?
"helping raise $750,000 for Kerry earlier this year....
In recent years, he's poured some of his money into the failed attempt to clone his dog... "
Meanwhile, the "Metro" candidate is running on what he did in 1968, and the "Retro" candidate is running on his vision for the 21st Century.
GREAT ADVICE ! I hope the democrats take it, because we know how well it worked for Mondale and Dukakis...
Is this guy related to the Toon's economic fairy tale spinner Gene Sperling?
Remember when Republicans had all the money?
How old are these guys anyway? Are they in good health?
The Hard Life and Restless Mind of America's Education Billionaire
John Sperling was born dirt-poor, fell in with Communists, and became a union organizer who led a strike that ended in disaster. Today, he runs the world's largest for-profit university -- and a company whose shares are defying gravity on Wall Street. So why do so many smart people say such terrible things about him? And why does he relish their attacks?
At first glance, he doesn't look like a street fighter. John Sperling, an 82-year-old former history professor, is an elf-sized fellow with gold-rimmed aviator glasses and a halo of gray hair. Twice divorced, he lives alone in an Italian-style estate near the sere hills of north Phoenix, where he is surrounded by citrus and pecan trees and paintings by Andy Warhol. As we meet in his poolside office on a sun-splashed winter day, he is retiring, almost shy.
But make no mistake: John Sperling, the man who put the profit into for-profit higher education, hasn't amassed a billion-dollar fortune by letting himself get pushed around. The longer we talk, the more his hard-charging attitude emerges. He drives a Jaguar. He favors a black leather biker jacket and a Greek sailor cap. He is direct, profane. And he enjoys nothing more than sticking it to the powers that be -- whether it's smug academic princes in the ivory tower or zealous antidrug warriors in the Bush administration.
Sperling is chairman of the Apollo Group Inc., a Nasdaq-traded holding company with a market cap of $7.5 billion, and founder of the University of Phoenix, the least by-the-book university imaginable. The Apollo Group owns the university, which makes it a school that you can attend and invest in at the same time. Comprised entirely of working adults (the minimum age is 23), the University of Phoenix is the largest private university system in the United States, with more than 140,000 students attending classes at 41 campuses. Factor in its distance-learning operation, and the University of Phoenix's reach extends across the world.
SNIP
"John Sperling's vision of education is entirely mercenary. It is merely one more opportunity to turn a buck," says Scott Rice, a San Jose State University English professor who is writing a book on the effort to monetize higher education. "When education becomes one more product, we obey the unspoken rule of business: to give consumers as little as they will accept in exchange for as much as they will pay. Sperling is a terrible influence on American education." Sperling is used to such biting commentary. In fact, he seems to welcome it. "Why do people say such things about us?" he asks. "Fear! Fear! Fear! They're scared to death of us."
If Democrats were half as smart as they think they are, we'd be in big trouble.
It's people like Sperling that make me wish we could have that Red/Blue state division in reality. The Dems could live in their own states and be governed by Dem policies and all that goes with it: socialized medicine, school, work uh, er let me see ...wasn't this at one time called COMMUNISM!!!
I just had a cool idea. Let's everybody write Mr. Sperling and enclose all of our medical bills from this past year and tell him we want him to pay our medical bills from now on, because he has the money. That way we could bypass all that bureaucratic red tape and get down to the reappropriation of wealth ourselves. Whaddya think?
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dunno...but someone here might.
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