Time Running Out On Conservative Group Freedom's Watch

[Purveyor]

By MICHAEL LUO, New York Times

The conservative group Freedom's Watch had been expected to be a deep-pocketed juggernaut in this year's presidential election, heralded by supporters on the right as an aggressive counterweight to MoveOn.org, George Soros and the like.

But after a splashy debut last summer, in which it spent $15 million in a nationwide advertising blitz supporting President Bush's troop escalation in Iraq, the group has been mostly quiet, beset by internal problems that have paralyzed it and raised questions about what kind of role it will actually play, if any, in November.

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Backers of Freedom's Watch once talked about spending some $200 million -- a figure that officials now say was exaggerated. Lending to the aura of ambition, the organization moved into a state-of-the-art 10,000-square-foot office in Washington and hired about 20 staffers.

Behind the scenes, however, Freedom's Watch has been plagued by gridlock and infighting, leaving it struggling for direction, according to several Republican operatives familiar with the organization who were granted anonymity so they could be candid about the group's problems. Although the organization was founded by a coterie of prominent conservative donors last year, the roughly $30 million the group has spent so far has come almost entirely from the casino mogul Sheldon G. Adelson, the chairman and chief executive of the Sands Corp., who was recently listed as the third-richest person in the country by Forbes magazine.

"What has happened here is pretty much you had a single donor who essentially dictates the way things occur or do not occur," said one of the Republican operatives.

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