E-Mail This Article to a Friend MoveOn confronts the future (continued)

Of course, one of MoveOn’s core premises is that the collective wisdom of its members is superior to the thinking of DC insiders. Co-founder Boyd cites the media-consolidation issue to argue this point. "Traditional people said, ‘That issue has no juice; you can’t get people excited about that,’ " he says. "But we got these rumblings from our base, unsolicited e-mails, comments showing up on our action forum [an open discussion on MoveOn.org]. So we did a petition, and we got a phenomenal response — and from that point, we built a campaign."

MoveOn and its allies won that fight. But in the recent presidential campaign, MoveOn’s determination to chart its own course frustrated some in the Kerry camp. The McCain-Feingold law prohibits organizations such as MoveOn from consulting with candidates; instead, they need to act "independently." In practice, though, all this really means is that (for example) a Kerry adviser can’t e-mail MoveOn with marching orders. Kerry and the various 527 organizations (named for the tax-code section that defines them; see "The $50 Million Dems," News and Features, July 23) that backed him were all working for the same goal, so it’s natural to assume the 527s would take their cues from the candidate. But according to one individual close to the Kerry campaign, that didn’t happen with MoveOn. Around the time of the Republican National Convention, this person claims, Kerry and his strategists wanted to focus on domestic issues instead of the war in Iraq, given the GOP’s evident intent to make the convention an orgy of patriotism. But MoveOn seemed unwilling to follow suit. "There was a general sense that when we didn’t want to be talking about the war, they were," says the Kerry insider. "And they were talking about it the way committed liberals are going to want to talk about it. We got to that stuff late in the campaign, but it certainly wasn’t the right message for us at the time. And there was a real true-believer fervor there, which works when you’re talking to the base — but when you’re talking to swing voters, it can be really off-putting."

MoveOn made other questionable choices in the campaign’s stretch drive. In September, for example, when some polls showed Kerry running neck-and-neck with Bush, a Gallup poll for CNN and USA Today showed Bush with a 13-point lead. MoveOn responded by taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times questioning Gallup’s methodology; the ad intimated that George Gallup Jr.’s faith — he is an evangelical Christian — had kept his company from using accurate polling techniques. By highlighting the disparity between Gallup and other polling organizations, MoveOn wanted to keep the media from propagating the myth of an insurmountable Bush lead. But given Kerry’s struggles wooing religious voters, the ad’s negative gloss on Gallup’s religious beliefs looms as imprudent.

Then there was MoveOn’s use of the commercials created for the group by Cambridge filmmaker Errol Morris, featuring Republicans who planned to vote for Kerry (see "Ad Value," News and Features, October 8). MoveOn paid to run Morris’s TV spots in battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, but took out only one print advertisement in conjunction with the ad buy — again, a full-page Times ad, featuring several of Morris’s Republican switchers. In an interview with the Phoenix, Morris grew agitated as he argued that the print ad should have run in newspapers such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where it could have augmented the TV ads’ ability to sway undecided voters. (The Times, of course, has a predominantly liberal readership.) When I raised this issue with Boyd, he told me the Times ad had been placed to create a buzz among media elites; television, he added, is a better medium for reaching large numbers of voters. That may be. But the decision to highlight Morris’s advertisements in the Times and nowhere else also raises the question of whether MoveOn’s eagerness to preach to the converted — or, more cynically, to publicize itself — caused it to miss opportunities among the nation’s undecideds.

Finally, any critical assessment of MoveOn’s conduct in the 2004 campaign has to mention the organization’s marked affinity for mixing entertainment and politics. There’s no clear reason why Hollywood liberalism generates such hostility among certain sectors of the electorate — or why celebrity endorsements of Republicans, such as Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s pro-Bush plug just before Election Day, don’t prompt similar outrage. That’s just how it is. But during the campaign, MoveOn seemed either not to notice this problem or not to care. In 2004, for example, the group signed up celebrities including Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin to direct anti-Bush ads; enlisted Moby, Jack Black, and Michael Stipe to judge MoveOn’s "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest; and sponsored an anti-Bush concert series featuring Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne. The progressive Web site Common Dreams deemed MoveOn’s push "the most systematic effort to enlist celebrities in liberal causes in several years." It’s impossible to quantify how much antipathy toward a perceived Democratic/show-biz alliance hurt Kerry and other candidates. But the next Democratic candidate, whoever that may be, will almost certainly endeavor to keep Hollywood at arm’s length. Will MoveOn get the message?

AT THIS POINT, it’s hard to say. Last week, asked if she could identify any mistakes MoveOn made during the recent election, co-founder Blades said she couldn’t. "Boy, I’m not good at the Monday-morning quarterbacking," Blades said, then moved into a discussion of voter suppression.

When the same question was put to Boyd, he thought for a few seconds. Then he said he’d like to deploy MoveOn’s financial resources differently in the next presidential election. "I think that I would work very hard to not be spending a lot of money on media in the last two months of the campaign," Boyd said, "but instead ensure a real progressive infrastructure, and that resources can be deployed in a far more nuanced way and in a deeper way in the last few months of the election cycle."

Of course, the idea behind MoveOn is that Blades and Boyd don’t get to decide alone. The 2.8 million members — a number that counts anyone who’s participated in one of the group’s "actions," including signing a petition or attending a house party — are supposed to decide MoveOn’s focus and tactics. In reality, however, pure democracy is no more possible in MoveOn than it is anywhere else. MoveOn’s leadership speaks of "deep listening," of keeping tabs on ideas that "bubble up" from the membership, but the sentiments of the masses still have to be processed and turned into concrete action by the staff. Still, when the masses make their feelings known, the leaders can’t embark on a radically different course of action. And at last month’s house parties, MoveOn’s members voted overwhelmingly to make the creation of a clear, compelling progressive message the group’s top priority in the years ahead.

Given the Democrats’ evident message deficit, this could help the party in the long run. But is a task this amorphous really suited to MoveOn’s institutional strengths? Or did MoveOn’s members, fresh off a devastating election loss, vote emotionally rather than logically? This points to an inherent problem: MoveOn’s structure, which gives its members a sense of empowerment, has made the group a success — but its members may not always make the best strategic decisions.

To his credit, Boyd admits MoveOn’s new mission poses a significant challenge. "The issue of how to engage in the development of a progressive agenda is like nothing we’ve done before," he says. "So to tell you the truth, we’re going to be trying different things. Trial and error is an important part of the process — to say, ‘Okay, here’s X way we can pursue, let’s give it a try.’ We do most things at a relatively low cost compared to traditional politics, so we can try a lot of things. We fail sometimes, and we succeed sometimes. That’s how we do good work — and we’re not afraid to fail." Now, if MoveOn is going to help rejuvenate the Democratic Party, it needs to learn from those failures.

Adam Reilly can be reached at areilly[a]phx.com.