I didn't make an argument on that one way or another. I honestly don't know.
What I will say is that the choice presented in the bill is the same presented to members of Congress.
none of us know for a fact (unless there is some data on different wordings).
it does look awfully slanted to me... (and my objection is not so much to the choice offered - but how those choices were described). do you, at least, see how it looks slanted (even if you don't know)?
i don't think it is unreasonable to see this as a slanted poll. after all, i am not alone in thinking the poll was slanted (even chris agrees).
that is my objection.
from a comment i wrote over at hullabaloo (where a similar conversation is going on):
maybe the poll was written in haste, without thinking it through and seeing how slanted it was... it doesn't take bad motives. maybe it was a mistake - in which case there should be an apology. that would be fine, i'd happily ask to have my membership reinstated.
but if moveon, or other people/organizations think it is ok to manipulate members (even if inadvertently done) to get the desired outcome, that is NOT ok with me. that is NOT an organization i am going to support.
complaining about it, withdrawing my support - this is all about accountability. something i'd like to think we have.
it is march 2007. not after the primary and before the general election. this is our best time to hold our politicians and our institutions (conservative or progressive) accountable.
No, I don't. This choice was what faced members of Congress. I see bias in this question, as there's always bias. But I don't see malice. This is good data, and 140,000 people or so participated in the vote.
We should stop pretending they are stupid.
First, I want to say that I respect Matt, Chris, and David Sirota and your position and I hope that you are right. I am wary of the way this turned out because it seemed that progressives are always forced to go along with the militarists instead of us pushing the militarists to compromise with us. I hope my caution is unwarranted. Anyway, that said:
You are right that the MoveOn question was the same one that Congress faced, but we are not in Congress. We are outsiders.
I would have preferred that MoveOn would have asked us: Do you think we should lobby progressive members of Congress to vote for this bill? Do you think we should lobby Republicans and conservative Democrats to vote for this bill or should we lobby them to cut off all funding for the war?
I would guess that most MoveOn members would say that we should lobby Repubicans and consevative Democrats to cut off all funding and hope that they would see the Pelosi bill as a compromise. And MoveOn members might say we should lobby progressives to vote against the bill to ensure that the bill stayed strong and is not watered down even further. These particular strategies might have been better than just blindly supporting the Pelosi bill.
It was this lack of other ways of going about this that bothered me. I felt like MoveOn was being led down the primrose path by the militarists as we often are. It wasn't until I read David Sirota's article that I really understood the strategy and how it might work.
In general, I really like the work that MoveOn does. I think they are very savvy and have done some great work. But I also think they have made some mistakes. When I saw this poll, I was very frustrated with it and how little it explained the strategy. In the past, MoveOn often wrote very detailed messages with lots of footnotes -- the messages educated their membership and got buyin. This message was not at all infomative and felt more manipulative to me. I would have preferred an explanation and no poll to what we got from MoveOn this time.
