A Conservative Answer to MoveOn

"There is a sense among those contributing to Freedom's Watch that MoveOn powerfully filled a void in the left, that rallied support in the left, that raised money from the left, that mobilized the left," said Ari Fleischer, a former Bush press secretary and a Freedom's Watch founder. The other organizers are Bradley A. Blakeman, another former Bush White House official, and Mel Sembler, a Florida strip-mall magnate who served as Bush's ambassador to Italy.

Wes Boyd, who co-founded MoveOn.org with his wife in their home in Berkeley, Calif., said the two groups are fundamentally different because his liberal organization was set up outside the influence of Democratic Party operatives and is funded primarily by small-dollar donors around the country.

Freedom's Watch, on the other hand, is "doing attack ads by Beltway operatives, financed by billionaires, at the request of the White House," Boyd said by e-mail. "MoveOn helps millions of real people get engaged and be heard and is solely funded by these same people."

For much of the debate over campaign finance legislation earlier this decade, Republicans argued that Congress should rein in independent political groups, known as 527 organizations because of the part of the tax code that governs them. Because those groups leaned primarily Democratic, the Democrats resisted.

"Now they're reaping what they sowed," Cole said.

Many 527s have faced tight scrutiny from the Federal Election Commission, so some operatives -- including the Freedom's Watch founders -- have decided to open political groups under a different section of the tax code that has received little attention from regulators, according to legal experts.

The organization was conceived at a Florida meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition last spring with the initial aim of defending Bush's policies in Iraq and Iran. But like its inspiration and antagonist, it has moved on.

The aggressively negative anti-illegal-immigration ads that ran during the Ohio special election race strayed far from Middle East policy, but the ad campaign -- like the group itself -- was bankrolled largely by Sheldon G. Adelson, a Las Vegas casino executive who last year pledged an unprecedented $200 million to Jewish and Israeli causes.

Adelson personally wrote an $80,000 check to Freedom's Watch on Dec. 7, according to Federal Election Commission documents, just four days before the election that gave Republican Robert Latta the House seat representing the district around Bowling Green. Behind a blood-red foreground, the group's ad showed Latinos hurrying under fences and being frisked by police as a narrator accused Democratic candidate Robin Weirauch and "liberals in Congress" of supporting free health care for illegal immigrants.

Fleischer said the turn toward the immigration issue should not have been a surprise.

"To us it wasn't a broadening" of the mission, he said. "We said prosperity through free enterprise and domestic issues were going to be on the agenda. But something had to come first, and what came first was the 'surge' and the president's policies in Iraq."

Fleischer cautioned that the scope of the group's involvement in the 2008 elections has not been decided. But the roughly $100,000 ad campaign in Ohio is a good indication.