Founding
Move America Forward was established in May 2004 by Republican political consultant Sal Russo, former Republican assemblyman Howard Kaloogian and former conservative Republican KSFO 560 AM talk show host Melanie Morgan, both of whom now serve as Move America Forward's co-chairmen. Both Russo and Kaloogian served in key roles in the successful Recall Gray Davis Committee that prompted the 2003 gubernatorial California recall election of California's Democratic governor — Kaloogian as chairman of the recall campaign, Russo as chief strategist. In November 2003, one month after the recall election, Russo told the Los Angeles Daily News of the 120,000 recall supporters in his database. "We took on the political establishment and won, and they feel empowered, ... They want to be involved. ... We'll change the name to something like 'Move America Forward,'" and go national, he predicted. A week later, the domain name MoveAmericaForward.com was registered to Russo's public relations firm, Russo Marsh & Rogers. Both Kaloogian and Russo continued on with Move America Forward in essentially the same roles as in the Recall Gray Davis Committee.
Russo Marsh & Rogers is Sacramento-based political public relations firm, with strong ties to the Republican Party. Russo, a principal in Russo Marsh & Rogers, worked on the political campaigns of Ronald Reagan, Alfonse M. D'Amato, George Pataki, Jack Kemp, and Orrin Hatch.
Howard Kaloogian and Sal Russo launched the Tea Party Express in the summer of 2009 as a project of their other political action committee, Our Country Deserves Better PAC. It has been reported that Russo's PR firm tied to the founding of Move America Forward, Russo Marsh + Rogers, has been a financial beneficiary of Tea Party Express' success: Zachary Roth at TPMmuckraker reported that in the period between July and November 2009, more than 75% of the money spent by the PAC—or about $1 million out of $1.3 million spent—went to Russo, Marsh or King Media Group, which has close ties to Russo.
Read more about this topic: Move America Forward
Famous quotes containing the word founding:
“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The responsible business men of this country put their shoulders to the wheel. It is in response to this universal demand that we are founding today, All-American Airways.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)