Before I start, caveats:

I worked for PIRG for two years, though I do not anymore.  Excellent experience in organizing and political operation.  Many social change organizing and activism groups simply treat PIRG as fodder for their mid-level positions, knowing that 1-2 years of working within the PIRG model is like 3-5 years with many other outfits.  PIRG organizers are passionate, smart, talented, and skilled.  They are not the "professional" class of campaign consultants.  They are professional organizers in that they view their work as a craft.  And they treat it that way and ply it that way.  For that, I am very grateful.  

I am now working (before heading back to school for a masters and/or PhD in public policy and poli sci) in the corporate world, making tons of money more than what I used to (and working slightly less hours, though not by much), for a socially hip and responsible software company.  But I am working with the executive team at 24-years old in part because of my great experiences with PIRG.  And what people have said above about the PIRG model in the sense that you have to be pretty tough and badass to do the work the way they do it is totally true.  It's not the only way to do the work in the larger sense, but an incredibly effective and time-tested way that has developed over time and continues to do so.  And any organizing and activism outfit will tell you that their model of organizing is the best, even those that are blatantly inferior.  The thing about PIRG is that while they're good at organizing and teaching people how to organize and especially at politicizing folks (I would say that about 40% of the people the PIRG/Fund network hires as organizers or directors - not canvassers - are not necessarily apolitical, but closer to that than political junkies), they are just not good strategists.  They pay lip-service to thinking strategically and thinking long-term, but I have really struggled seeing it in their work, and in the ways many of you have brought up like treatment of workers and attitudes and cultishness (about that I kid - if you work 12-16 hour days with people for 3 months, 6 months, 9 months straight, you develop a bond and you grow more similar...the whole PIRGcest thing is like that too - and I'm glad about that, it's how I met my future wife as she was on the USPIRG board and chaired the State PIRG student board at the time I worked as a canvass director).  But really, you can't go to PIRG and ask for a good electoral strategy or good long-term strategy about politics and social change, because frankly, their intelligence and aptitude are not in that direction.  They are about organizing, and being good at that.  Ask 5 different organizers if long-term political strategy is part of a good organizer's toolkit, and all 5 will say yes, but 3 of them won't know what you really mean and the other two will just be inept in that area anyway.  

And that's what this comes down to.  More caveat-ing: I was called up by the Fund's national director while working out of Chicago to move to Columbus during the LNVB campaign to help pick up a flagging office that had been staffed partially by GCI people, and partially by PIRG people.  Here's the dirty secret you've been looking to find: the people who were PIRG folks who took leaves of absence from their normal gigs to go run the MoveOn (p.s. Adam Ruben from MoveOn went through PIRG's Green Corps organizing school and was USPIRG national field director before he went to MoveOn - and he's really good at what he does; and MoveOn recognized that GCI could be a thing that was as good as the PIRG thing they used to work for - I believe that more than just Adam were PIRG staff before - and that's why they initially went with GCI to do work for them) part of the campaign were great at their jobs, and the offices built around them survived.  The people who were initially all GCI were largely gone by the time I got there because they were a) not that great organizers and b) mentally not tough.  That is part of the thing; GCI was roughly a year old by the time 2004 rolled around in full.  They did not have the national infrastructure built up in the middle and lower levels the way PIRG has cultivated for years.  By now, and in the future, I would bet that GCI will get much better at it and end up being better than PIRG, because I see a longer-term swing away from issue groups (especially as they blow themselves into irrelevance) and toward better partisan organization on the liberal side of things.  And liberal politics and Democratic Party ID (at the least the latter will be in the future, and the former is now) are easier to attract and recruit around on a sheer emotional level than any particular issue.  So that will come with time.  The 2004 experience was the first of its kind, and sooooooooooo many kinks needed to be worked out.  I am more than willing to give GCI another shot or three at getting it right, especially as they continue to improve (and actually suck away old PIRG staff and attract some quality new people).  

GCI doesn't need to be less like PIRG, but in many ways needs to become more like PIRG, and they are.  But the fact of the matter is that neither GCI nor PIRG are going to cover the strategic plans for large-scale partisan-based (or otherwise) social change.  They can implement the tactics really well, and I see a corps of more or less professional organizers working in communities as a great way to empower local citizens to be the change (although both PIRG and GCI need to do a much better job of hiring people and placing them closer to their natural homes and not just plucking some girl from Connecticut that went to Sarah Lawrence and plopping her in say Austin or some dude from a Big 10 school and shipping him out to the East Coast...it is a larger issue of recruitment that could be a whole discussion on its own).  But the strategy has to come from another place.  

In 2004, the GCI people didn't do a bad job running the DNC canvass.  They did mess up a lot and had some really poorly-trained, unskilled people on the ground and middle-levels.  But by and large, they capitalized on the sentiments of the nation in liberal cities to raise money and build a fundraising list, which was their mission (handed down to them and contracted, I might add).  And while their people were just not ready to run a GOTV campaign, especially in the most hotly-contested election in modern history, things went OK.  There were indeed problems, but again, I attribute that more to GCI being a young organization at the time than their model or organizing.  Has anyone here who has bitched about the hours and treatment worked on a serious electoral campaign before?  I can't imagine anyone had on a presidential campaign of this magnitude, because really, there hasn't been one like this in our lifetimes (unless you were bopping around Kennedy or McCarthy HQ in 1968).  So you know what, if the hours were long (I worked no less than 16 hours a day the entire time I was on GCI's payroll in Ohio as a field organizer with the MoveOn campaign), yeah, but they had to be.  Staff get treated gruffly at times when you're stressed, when you have tight deadlines, and when it's about passions and ideals (much more so than money - there's always another gig in the corporate world, you can't just win another election in a month if you lose in politics).  Yes, it happens.  But I can't help but echo what has been said by others about thin-skin/thick-skin.

I'll grant a few points and say that that is really where I think this discussion should head, not just wholesale complaints about "the hours are too long" or "the pay is too low" or "I got misled."  Yes the hours are long, but there's a lot to do and not a huge budget to do it on (i.e. hire more staff) especially compared to what the right has working for it.  The pay is low because we work for progressive causes.  We're not working to repeal the estate tax for the upper 1% of wealth-owners, we're working to bring about an economy that is as close to being as just to the lowest level of its workers as it is to the highest owner of production as is possible.  Deal with the lack of money or get out of it.  I did, and I'm thrilled, because now I can volunteer instead of doing it professionally, and I'm making money and having another amazing experience for professional growth - and best of all, I figured out that I want back in.  The money isn't worth it to do something else, and I'm happy enough when working for peanuts doing something I love (in a larger meta-sense, I'm not going to do the on-the-ground organizing or canvass directing I have done before).  And if you think you were misled in the past, sorry.  I think I might have been initially too, but it worked out so much better than what I could have ever possibly imagined.  And if that were the case 2 years ago, I feel like both PIRG and GCI have become so much better than they ever were before about being up-front, clear, and direct about their expectations for people and what it is they'll do.  So at best, your complaints are out of date.  At worst, people with these complaints might have just had a touch of naivete and misunderstanding about political organizing or campaign work.

What I say is that those who are responsible for larger-level and longer-term strategizing need to do a better job.  Not in that they should choose not to contract with GCI, but instead in choosing what they have things like GCI do.  Right now, thanks to the 50-state strategy and people giving $$ to the DNC, they have hired their own organizers everywhere.  That's awesome, and I'm taking the organizer that lives around me (who needs to do a better job getting me doing volunteer things with the background I have, but he's good people, so I'll cut him some slack) out for a beer and food next week.  He deserves it and works hard and does a good job.  The 50-state strategy is a third-tier long term strategy.  And it's a damn good one (tiers are not about quality, but depth of timeframe and goals - too much to talk about here I realize now).  But that is not going to be enough full time organizing for election year and non election year activities.  The DNC and the Democrats and DCCC and DSCC (when the latter two get their shit together and move beyond dollars) need to have someone that they can count on to help out and do other great things.  That's where GCI can come in and provide that expertise for actualization.  GCI can do it for other groups like PFAW or MoveOn (don't mistake MoveOn.org for MoveOn PAC or whatever, the election law is what separates them, but in name only - don't kid yourself into thinking that MoveOn PAC is not the same entity as MoveOn.org).  But the second-tier ( second lowest-level) strategy like actually having a consistent door-to-door canvass to contact voters and do x, y, or z (the choice of x, y, or z - first and second tier I would consider "tactics") has to come from a set of people at the DNC or wherever that have their shit together.  That is what it means to have Howard Dean as chairman - we have to keep him around (another point: I got to meet Howard Dean because of my experience doing the MoveOn organizing in Ohio - he's good people for real and professionally).  All the good strategizing has to come from enlightened people - and that doesn't mean professional losers like Bob Shrum, who I assure you had nothing to do with GCI or MoveOn's work.  It means a reformed DNC and Democratic Party.  And then we'll see a better third and fourth tier of strategy.

Should GCI re-evaluate what happened to them and their people and what went wrong in 2004?  Of course.  But it's too late now to make that comment fairly.  They already have.  And I'm sure that they will post 2006 as well and so on.  That's just good business.  They might not always get it right.  I would say that there is no single entity of organization in the world, business, political, etc. that has their model (if they even have one, much less a working one) 75% down and just well-oiled.  So don't expect it out of such a young one like GCI.  But they were phenomenally successful at what they did when they did it, relatively speaking.  Now it's about reconciling the word "relatively" with the concept of absolutely and being part of creating a progressive government.  

So again, it's about what the strategy is and who lays it out.  GCI was young in 2004, developing all the time.  PIRG/GCI are professional organizers, not consultants (and they're both good at it, with PIRG being better, but GCI getting better all the time).  

Remember the Democratic Party has been largely f'ed for a long time, and has legitimately lost every single presidential election since Johnson except for two (Carter won, Kennedy would have in 68 if he hadn't been shot, Clinton hardly counts).  That's a long stretch.  Don't judge GCI or the DNC on one single election that employed a novel concept.