Influence of MoveOn undeniable
BERKELEY, Calif. -- The biggest powerhouse in progressive politics had decidedly inauspicious beginnings: an overheard conversation at a local Chinese restaurant, a high-tech chain letter, and $89.
Five years ago, tech entrepreneurs Joan Blades and her husband, Wes Boyd -- whose company gave the world the flying-toaster screen saver -- were eating lunch and listening to a group at a nearby table lamenting the time and energy wasted on the President Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. Blades and Boyd decided to start a petition urging Congress to forgo impeachment, censure Clinton instead, and move on. They e-mailed it to their friends, asked them to pass it on, and paid $89 to set up a website where people could register their support.
Within a week, more than 100,000 people had put their names on the petition, flooring Blades and Boyd. They decided to make their new network of like-minded folks permanent. MoveOn.org was born.
Today, the organization has 1.7 million members -- as many as the Christian Coalition at its height. Its members discuss issues and set the group's priorities on the site, and MoveOn sends regular news updates. It has raised millions of dollars in small contributions from those members -- for Democratic candidates, full-page newspaper advertisements, and prime-time television spots that criticize the Bush administration.
MoveOn's Internet techniques were adopted by former governor Howard Dean of Vermont to power his formidable fund-raising machine. Dean's rivals -- and even the GOP -- are now using them in ways that are revolutionizing political activism and campaign finance.
The organization has sent thousands of volunteers to register their views in congressional offices and to work on political campaigns, and spurred its members to vehement, coordinated protests against the war in Iraq, a war that sent its membership soaring in late 2002. MoveOn.org now consists of an issue advocacy group, a political action committee, and a Voter Fund for battleground-state advertising in 2004. That advertising fund has collected $10 million in mostly small donations from MoveOn members. Billionaire philanthropist and Bush critic George Soros, with insurance magnate Peter Lewis, has committed $5 million in matching funds.
"We sent out this one-sentence petition, and that just ended up sidetracking us for far longer than we'd ever imagined," said Blades.
MoveOn is lauded by Democrats, who credit it with bringing new voters and new life to their causes. It is loathed by Republicans, who call it shadowy and hateful. And it is imitated by everyone. Its methods of raising funds and building networks -- unprecedented in American politics -- have been adopted by both major parties, the presidential candidates, and scores of other advocacy groups.
"They have innovated in ways some of us never imagined," said Michael Cornfield, research director at George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet.
The organization is managed by a paid staff of eight, all working from their homes. Boyd and Blades, both volunteers, preside over the operation from their Berkeley house. Blades, 47, who was working on a laptop in her sun-filled dining room on a recent afternoon, is still amazed at where she and Boyd have ended up. Especially since neither of them had ever been involved in politics before that lunch.
Now they are truly involved, the object of Republican ire because of a MoveOn contest soliciting 30-second television spots criticizing Bush. Two of the 1,500 entries compared the president to Adolf Hitler.
"Their entire message is one of relentless personal attacks on the president of the United States," said Christine Iverson, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. "The Hitler ads are vicious personal attacks, and they are completely unacceptable."
MoveOn apologized for the spots, even though they were not made by MoveOn or chosen as winners by the members.
"It's really playing the game for the RNC to take those ads and make an issue of them, because a hundred times as many people saw them," Blades said. "We apologized. This is about letting people get involved in the process, and that is more messy than having a closely managed message."
Another fracas erupted when CBS refused to air the winning ad during the Super Bowl. The spot, called "Child's Play," shows a series of children working blue-collar jobs and ends with the line: "Guess who's going to pay off Bush's $1 trillion deficit?" MoveOn protested, taking out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times criticizing CBS and urging members to protest the decision with e-mails and phone calls. Several hundred thousand people contacted the network, according to MoveOn.
The network countered that it has a policy against controversial ads during the Super Bowl. The dispute gave the ad plenty of free air time; it has also been airing on other channels, including CNN.
Last week, MoveOn sent an e-mail to its 1.7 million members asking them to speed a note to their congressional representatives urging censure of Bush for misleading the nation on whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. To do that, protesters insert their names and addresses into a form, write an optional personal message and hit send. The message is automatically forwarded to the correct representative. With the click of a mouse, the protest page can be passed on to friends. Another click sends users to pages where they can volunteer or make a donation. The censure campaign is backed up by another television spot, called "Lie Detector," which shows the arm on a polygraph machine jerking wildly as viewers hear excerpts from Bush's 2003 State of the Union address in which he made the case for war in Iraq. The group is spending $1.5 million on the spot, which is running in five swing states.
MoveOn's methods have been adopted across the political spectrum, most notably by Dean, who was unknown nationally until his use of MoveOn's techniques on his own website won him tens of millions of dollars in small contributions, thousands of volunteers, and for a while last year put him atop opinion polls in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Dean's campaign sought out MoveOn's organizing director, Zack Exley, to help hone its Internet fund-raising, build its e-mail list, and make the website more interactive, so that supporters could more easily find ways to work for Dean locally. Exley, who was paid for his services by the Dean campaign, offered the other candidates similar help, but they did not accept.
"Back then, Dean was the desperate one," Exley said. Other Democrats quickly caught on, however.
As has the other side.
The Bush-Cheney reelection campaign now has an e-mail list 6 million people long, and Web organizers have designated team leaders who are responsible for distributing bulletins and appeals for action to other Bush supporters, giving the operation a more formal structure than MoveOn's. That campaign "is going to be the best-organized multimedia -- including Internet -- get-out-the-vote operation this country has ever seen," said Cornfield.
For all of its innovations, MoveOn's results have been mixed. Despite MoveOn's efforts Clinton was impeached (though the group sent plenty of donations to fight impeachment supporters in the 2000 congressional contests) and actions to prevent the California recall were unsuccessful. The group was ultimately unable to prevent the Bush administration from invading Iraq, though Blades said members' appeals to their representatives in Washington forced the lawmakers to demand that Bush seek legislative approval first.
Still, the site has galvanized groups that were marginalized before, and sent progressives' views into the mainstream both online and offline, onto the computer screens of United Auto Workers in Ohio and the televisions of CNN viewers in Pennsylvania.
"I wish passionately that realism and sanity had prevailed" on Iraq], she said. "But we have this huge group of citizens that are far more politically aware now. We've certainly not had universal success, but on the other hand, we've done a lot."
