The New York Times' Michael Luo has the story.

The conservative group Freedom's Watch, headlined by two former senior White House officials, 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, if any, it will actually play this fall.

The group was conspicuously absent this week as Gen. David H. Petraeus, the United States commander in Iraq, returned to Congress to testify. Moreover, the troubles at Freedom's Watch come as some Democratic-aligned groups are seeking to take the offensive, with one group, Progressive Media USA, planning to raise $40 million to spend on advertisements and other efforts to undermine Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee.

[...]

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 a staff of about 20, with talk of bringing in scores more for a vigorous campaign to promote conservative issues.

[...]

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 Corporation, who was recently listed as the third-richest person in the country by Forbes magazine.

It's not a terrible surprise that yet another right wing 527 organization that was supposed to be the savior for conservatives and Republicans has failed. While organizing a group as a 527 rather than a normal political committee allows contributors to donate unlimited and unregulated sums of money (instead of $5,000 checks that must be disclosed), Republican donors aren't stupid -- their chances this year aren't great, and there isn't necessarily much upside in throwing good money after bad (particularly when longer-term investments might be a better bet given the John McCain's relatively low likelihood of victory and the near impossibility that the GOP will retake either chamber of Congress).

But what Luo misses is this: The reason why Freedom Watch and all of the other right wing 527s billed as the new Republican version of MoveOn (there have been at least four others in recent memory) is that there is nothing grassroots about these organizations whatsoever. MoveOn started as a grassroots organization fighting against the right wing's attempted coup that was the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Even today, although the group does get significant funding from large dollar donors, much of its energy comes from the several million members who get involved and stay involved, whether in elections or in key issues (net neutrality, FISA, Iraq, etc.)

In the end, that's what politics should be about. The money can make a big difference, no doubt. But the money cannot trump the people when the people are active, involved and paying attention. So no matter how many $30 million donors they have on the right, if the left can continue to organize and activate the American people, no one or two donors dumping tens of millions of dollars will be able to override the will of the public.