With 13 Nobel laureates on the board and a gig this week on Comedy Central, Scientists and Engineers for America is not your typical political operation. Organized as a 527 group — able to advocate for issues but not support or oppose candidates — SEA is speaking out against the political manipulation of research results and in favor of additional research money.
Unlike other science groups —which tend to step well back from politics — SEA is taking its campaign straight to the voters. It is raising money to buy political ads in key states and set up speakers to get their point across in time for the fall election. Those fall races are also just the beginning: The group is planning for the long haul with its eyes firmly on the 2008 presidential race. Under the guidance of Executive Director Mike Brown, a Capitol Hill veteran and the 2004 election campaign manager for Virginia’s Republican Congressman Jim Moran, SEA is targeting federal races in Maryland, Virginia, Missouri, Ohio, Michigan and Washington state. Most of these races have candidates facing off over stem cell research, Brown said. Voters are also weighing positions on global warming and Ohio has a ballot initiative on intelligent design.
“That’s where we believe there are science issues at play where the candidates have a distinction in their positions on issues that are relevant to our community,” Brown told The Examiner. “We also believe that those are areas where the elections are sufficiently close where our involvement could help make a difference.”
SEA has some 4,500 members — far more than Brown expected to have after only two months of operation. The group is also reaching well outside the world of academia and research to new audiences. On Thursday night, SEA board member Dr. Peter Agre, a Nobel prizewinner in chemistry, will take his case to fans of Stephen Colbert on the Comedy Channel’s “The Colbert Report.”
According to federal filings, SEA had raised nearly $60,000 as of Sept. 30 — $50,000 of it from Lee Fikes, a self-employed Texas investor. But the reporting period was short. Brown said roughly 450 of those who joined have contributed and the group has not actually begun fundraising yet. Despite their progress, they have a long way to go, said David Wasserman, the editor covering the congressional House races for the Crystal Ball project of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
“If they want to have a large-scale impact on that number of states that you have mentioned, they will probably have to raise over $5 million,” Wasserman said. “That will buy you a week of television in all those states.”
Even so, the group is well-placed for the 2008 election Wasserman said. “It is good to be planning now,” said Wasserman. “… to the extent they get a jump-start on this, they’ll have an advantage over other groups.”
