It has become a sore point for Norton, who complains that fund-raising, not facts, caused the groups to portray her as an extremist. When those groups unleashed their version of what I had been doing for the last 20 years, I wondered where I had been. I wondered if they had me mixed up with some other Gale Norton.
Some groups are reluctant to release precise fund-raising data.
But there's already evidence of a Norton effect. Take the relatively obscure group, Republicans for Environmental Protection. It was founded in 1995. N.M. And then came the Norton battles. The group raised its profile by joining a broad coalition of groups opposing Norton over her past views questioning the Endangered Species Act and Surface Mining Act, and her backing President Bush's call for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.