We Just Lost a ‘Paul Revere’ in the Fight to Save Democracy

Rob Stein saw it coming.

The political activist and former government official died this week at the age of 78.

While much of America was shocked by this week’s bombshell leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion striking down a woman’s fundamental right to control of her own body, two decades ago Rob described exactly how we were going to get to this point.

After serving in the Clinton administration, which is where I met him, Rob began to analyze the right wing in America. Even then, conservatives were coordinating to take control of critical elements of our system—from statehouses to the judiciary.

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Following the 2002 elections, Rob produced a study of Republican funding networks. He found the GOP to be exceptionally disciplined in the way it played the long game.

Conservatives wanted to win elections, sure, but their real focus was on institutionalizing their own power, so they could impose their views for decades to come—even after massive demographic shifts in the US would be unfavorable to them. I will never forget sitting with him in 2003 during one of our periodic breakfasts at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington as he unveiled his presentation called, “The Conservative Message Machine’s Money Matrix.”

By the time he had prepared his analysis of the years-long effort by the GOP to win at the statehouse level—so they could control districting initiatives to support candidates who shared their views on campaign finance and voting rights—the U.S. had already been rocked by the politicization of the Supreme Court, as manifest in its Bush v. Gore decision.

The 2002 midterms were a rare instance when the party in the White House actually strengthened its hold on the Congress and a majority of state legislatures. Rob saw what was happening, and worried that if the Democrats did not undertake a similar effort, there would be a “point of no return” after which the US would no longer be functioning as a democracy.

He was not content to offer analysis and warnings, however. The stakes were too high.

Rob reached out to donors he knew and put together something called the Democracy Alliance. The goal was not just to raise money, but to allocate it in informed ways to races that really mattered, to be as strategic and disciplined as the other side was being. Since Rob founded the group, it has raised a reported $2 billion and also helped create anti-right-wing disinformation groups like Media Matters.

Several years ago, after he discovered he was ill with the disease that would ultimately claim his life this week, Rob called me up and suggested we have lunch. I went and greeted him with a typical, “How are you doing?” And he responded, “I’m dying,” adding that he probably only had a few years left.

I was, naturally, shocked and wanted to know more about the diagnosis and treatment. He said, no, that was not why he wanted to have lunch. He wanted to talk about me.

Few people were as selfless in friendship as Rob. After our former boss, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, died in 1996 along with several of our colleagues and friends in a plane crash, it was Rob who consoled the inconsolable (including me). Despite the devastation he felt, he made it his mission to make others feel comforted.

At our lunch, so soon after learning of his imminent mortality, he said to me: “I’ve been thinking about you and reading and watching your work. You are now at an important juncture in your life.”

I responded with some disparaging joke about my age, which he brushed off and replied: “No. This can be a new start. This is the beginning of the third act of your life. This can be the best one. You can make a difference. But you need to decide to do that. And I want to help you with that decision if I can.”

I’ll admit, it was, for me, a revolutionary view…and an inspiring one. But just as he did with American politics, Rob not only saw the challenges—he constantly sought out solutions.

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The crisis in our democracy he predicted two decades ago is now more extreme than it has ever been. From the assaults on the rule of law of the Trump years to the attempted coup; from the corrosive effect of the Big Lie to using the Senate to pack the courts and render them into engines of pure politics—Rob called it.

The “point of no return” he warned me of is looming.

For Rob, as manifested in every aspect of his life, the answer was to search harder for answers, to work more energetically to produce change, to fight more fiercely for the values in which we believe.

In other words, Rob not only saw the current crisis coming (and sought to avoid it), he also saw clearly organized, strategic, informed, intensive action as the only solution to the challenges we face.

Somehow, if we can just capture his clarity, vision, commitment, resourcefulness, intelligence and reality-based optimism, we can achieve the goal he sought…and set the country on the path to a great next act in the American story.

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