Today my friend, colleague and hero Roger Craver is being inducted into the American Association of Political Consultants Hall of Fame.

Here’s what AAPC has to say about Roger …

David Broder called him “a bomb thrower”… The Wall Street Journal claimed he was the “assassin” of all things right wing.

Many of the household names in progressive politics and movement advocacy were launched and built under his guidance: the first organization, Common Cause, in 1969, and then the National Organization for Women, Greenpeace, Amnesty, NARAL, Handgun Control, Inc. (now the Brady Campaign), the World Wildlife Fund, Environmental Defense and dozens of others.

Older organizations were relaunched by him: the ACLU, the League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood and The Wilderness Society. In the fray of Watergate, he won a place on Nixon’s enemys list for his work exposing the brown bag contributions to CREEP, the Committee to Re-elect the President.

Roger, whose Washington watchword is “no permanent friends, no permanent enemies”, designed and built the direct mail programs for the DNC, the DSCC and the DCCC. Despite these lucrative contracts, he shocked the consulting community by resigning from these accounts as a matter of principle. He left the DNC in 1986 over a disagreement with the lobbying practices of its leadership. In 1987, he left the DCCC over Jim Wright’s ethics challenges involving a book deal, and in 1992, he walked away from the DSCC over its leadership’s hesitancy to support Anita Hill and stand up against Clarence Thomas’ nomination.

Roger and his firm, Craver, Mathews, Smith & Company, raised record amounts of money in the late ’70s for key Democratic candidates Frank Church, George McGovern, Birch Bayh, John Culver. In 1976, he raised record amounts for the presidential campaign of Mo Udall and again in 1980 for Ted Kennedy’s and John Anderson’s presidential races.

In 1987, Roger and Republican consultant Doug Bailey founded The Hotline – today the preeminent daily online presence on American politics. The Hotline counts among many alumni Chuck Todd, currently the political director of NBC News.

A pioneer who won’t quit, Roger founded Public Interest Communications, the first large telemarketing firm for advocacy and progressive politics, in 1975, then The Hotline in 1987. Then, in 1995, he founded New Media Publishing, the first Internet company to build websites and update them daily for clients such as WWF International, the International Red Cross, UNICEF and the Feminist Majority, along with 25 other organizations.

Today, Roger is the founder of DonorTrends, a company providing fundraising intelligence, predictive models and market research to the nonprofit and political communities. diMobile is his latest company, building mobile engagement applications for the next generation of activists and hell-raisers.

Roger publishes the daily blog TheAgitator.net, is a summa cum laude graduate of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and holds a summa cum laude JD from GW’s National Law Center. Today, he is working on the organization that will elect our next president, Americans Elect.

Impressive, no?

I’m honored to have been associated with Roger for forty years … since 1971 at Common Cause.

He’s taught me everything I know about bomb throwing. For which I am eternally grateful.

Tom

P.S. Roger, you deserve a raise! But don’t let this go to your head. We’re expecting heaps more from you. Bombs away!