The meeting’s organizer was Peter B. Lewis, the seventy-year-old reclusive chairman of the Progressive Corporation, an insurance company based in Cleveland, Ohio. He has spent much of 2004 discreetly directing millions of dollars to liberal groups allied with the Democratic Party, such as America Coming Together and MoveOn.org, while cruising the Mediterranean Sea on his two-hundred-and-fifty-foot yacht, Lone Ranger. The yacht has communications equipment that allows Lewis to monitor political developments in America while sunbathing off the coast of Italy. Lewis, a major backer of efforts to decriminalize marijuana, has helped underwrite campaigns to hold referenda on decriminalization in Arizona and California. According to Lewis’s friends, he concluded that it would be best to remain a shadow figure in the 2004 campaign ..(via Just One Minute). Posted by Greg RansomFlying in from Arizona was John Sperling, an octogenarian businessman who in 1976 created the for-profit University of Phoenix. Sperling is also the co-author of a recent book, “The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America,” which suggests that the 2004 election is a contest between “‘God, Family, and Flag’ folks”—who live in the South, the Great Plains, the Rockies, and Appalachia—and forward-thinking metropolitans who support “economic modernity,” “religious moderation,” and “excellence in education and science.”
Herb and Marion Sandler, a California couple in their seventies, came to Aspen looking for ways to give back to a country that had allowed them to prosper. The founders of Golden West Financial Corporation, a savings-and-loan company worth seventeen billion dollars, the Sandlers are devoted to the idea of preserving progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes.
The wealthiest participant at this meeting of hard-core partisans .. was George Soros ..