Cute hat.

I was a local volunteer with MoveOn's field effort in 04 and also housed a paid organizer -- and found it to be as horrendous as you suggest. From the beginning, they were resistent to input from local folks who had been doing local organizing for years and insisted everything had to follow an absurdly top-down model that fell apart completely within 2 weeks of the arrival of the paid organizers. The entire staff was let go and then when these 12 kids found jobs with another progressive campaign, MoveOn called me and told me that I should no longer house the staffer. IN other words, tell a 21-year old woman who had come to town to work for what amounted to sub-minimum wage that she had no place to stay.

The outcome was that dozens of local voluntees, who were recruited by MoveOn explicitly on the premise that working with the state democratic party would be ineffective, were wasted.

And now they are back, again trying to pull local volunteers away from existing campaigns and causes by claiming that they are ineffective and only MoveOn (ie, GCI) can succeed.

Bizarre, maddening and depressing. I no longer will donate to MoveOn.

How should it be done?

I am a former MoveOn employee too.  I was one of the first 11 MoveOn field staff ever hired and had the chance to work directly for MoveOn until I too was "outsourced" to GCI.  There is no doubt in my mind that GCI, is at best, a difficult organization to work for.

However, the central premise of your post so far as I can tell is that MoveOn's GOTV model did not work because GCI sucked.

We all have our axes to grind, and GCI as I have already said, is a challenging organization to work for, but your critique of the voter contact model used in 2004 beyond the faults of GCI is pretty weak.

Now first, and foremost, I was a leader organizer in Philadelphia.  

Philadelphia alone turned out about half of the MoveOn vote in Pennsylvania as a whole.  Pennsylvania was the top state in which MoveOn played a role.  I have had a chance to see a study of MoveOn's impact and there is no doubt that there was a higher turnout in precincts in which MoveOn volunteers turned out new and infrequent voters.

Now what does that mean?  Well MoveOn potentially turned out about 20-40,000 voters statewide that would not have otherwise voted.  Kerry won PA by 120,000 votes.  As such, for a statewide operation with 60 staff and a budget of less than $500,000, that is pretty impressive.

Additionally, The Legue of Young Voter study, the current field staff at America Votes, as well as a scattering of election academics all agree that getting neighbors or peers to talk to each other about voting increases turnout.  This is also how politics always worked pre-TV.

I wanted badly to continue to work for MoveOn post-election, but I could not survive on the salary that GCI would have paid me.  So, again, I feel you about what sucks about GCI.  

However, I believe so much in the work we did at MoveOn that I started my own PAC called Philadelphians Against Santorum. (You can see our website here, or read the shout-out we got from Chris Bowers here).  The goal of PAS is to turnout as many new, infrequent and young voters as possible in Philadelphia to help beat Rick Santorum statewide.

Is volunteer-drive, person-to-person field contact everything?  

No.  Of course it isn't.  However, MoveOn is not the DNC.  And the truth is that the problems we face in electing good progressives are pretty much the fault of our own party.

However. MoveOn is a place where busy people who want to effect change can come together and act.  The result of that collective action is that MoveOn can move a certain number of votes--maybe not enough votes to be decisive in every race--but certainly enough to get the attention of a party that fundamentally devalues grassroots participation.

The tendency of progressives to always think they can find a magic bullet to our problems frustrates me.  We are only going to win by organizing one-one-one, and talking to people we don't know more than people we do.

Your beefs with GCI as a manager are worth airing, but to devalue the theory behind peer-based voter contact is cynical and destructive. Lumping GCI and MoveOn into the same category as party-trained campaign consultants is ridiculous.  The GCI/MoveOn GOTV model had had its flaws--but replicating the spipn-driven, more-of-the-same bullshit that "professional" campaigns implement was not on.

However, the central premise of your post so far as I can tell is that MoveOn's GOTV model did not work because GCI sucked.

I ask that you re-read the post, then. My intent is certainly not to 'devalue the theory behind peer-based voter contact.' It isn't even to 'complain' that GCI has bad management problems -- I could go there, but it's not necessary. I won't argue with your post (except to express extreme doubt in the existence of a study that presents sound evidence of our turnout effect) -- I only ask you to try a little harder to hear what I'm saying. And since I've only laid out the premise of this series here, please stick around and give me the chance to say more of it.

I've been waiting for the time when I say something in this ongoing conversation which really gets me on a progressive blacklist.  Here we go:

The biggest problem with the MoveOn campaign--which was even more screwed-up than Greg describes, in my opnion--was the technology.  The whole campaign was to be run through a brilliant innovation called the Web Action Center (or WAC).  Well, the WAC crashed and burned and we ended up running the entire campaign through MS Excel spreadsheets, wasting hours of organizers' time every day.  Here is the shittiest part: the WAC was designed not by a top web firm or old master of GOTV technology, but by Justin Ruben, Adam Ruben's (a senior MoveOn staffer) brother.  

It is rough to watch such a robust and supposedly forward-looking campaign collapse under the weight of old-school nepotism.  Among volunteers on the ground and among the emerging "next generation of operatives" MoveOn did a lot to hurt their own reputation and tarnish their brand with the GCI campaign.  In addition to farming out the most important work of the campaign to a family member (a bad idea even in an enterprise far less demanding than a major political campaign), MoveOn also seceeded from the America Votes Coalition (presumably at GCI's behest) and ensured redundancy and ill-will with our "allie" organizations like ACT.

Get out of Florida.

As a veteran of many campaigns (including the MoveOn 2004 LNVB effort), I've got to say that it sounds like grassroots political organizing is not, how shall I put it, Greg's calling. That's okay. It's not for everybody. But please don't take it out on the rest of us.

I can't help but notice that Greg's getting hung up on the relatively minor things that went wrong - rather than all the big things that went right. Yeah, it was hard work. Yeah, there was some hollerin' late at night (has anyone ever worked on an electoral campaign without a little bit of, er, creative tension?). And sure, we had to revise some of our systems on the fly.

But that goes with the territory - both short term campaign mobilization and the kind of long-term progressive movement building for which Greg advocates and which MoveOn.org has pioneered. Getting people organized is hard work and it requires tough people to do it. In the words of Democratic strategist Michael Houley, "All I know is that the ones who stop fighting first always lose."

From a broader perspective, I find it quite surprising that Greg chose MoveOn.org as his target, despite his negative experience in political organizing. I feel like if he had lifted his head up from his navel for one second any time over the last 10 years he would have noticed that MoveOn.org has probably done more than any other organization to build a lasting grassroots-based progressive movement.

As I describe in my forthcoming book Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party, in the late 1990's, while Democratic party hacks (and most of the big progressive foundation dollars) were funneling their resources into lobbyists, ad buys, and single issue organizing, MoveOn was building a movement. MoveOn made a critical innovation in progressive organizing (or, rather, remembered some basic principles of community organizing). MoveOn mobilized people by appealing to them on the hot issues of the day - giving them a way to do something about the things they already cared about. It gives people the tools to do something about their priorities, rather than imposing its own priorities.

As a result, MoveOn has found it comparatively easy to get people involved - and has seen its membership grow literally exponentially to over 3.2 million.

These people might first get involved on a single hot issue - the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the Iraq fiasco, high gas prices, drilling in the Arctic Refuge, or an election. But MoveOn gets you hooked really quickly. You start to see how millions of people working together can make a difference. You start to see that the same people and institutions are behind all of these problems - and looking for ways to tackle their power systematically. This grassroots support was why they were able to raise more than $50 million in primarily small donations to work on the 2004 elections - and $50 million don't lie - that's a lot of authentic grassroots love for MoveOn.org.

Movement building was what MoveOn's Leave No Voter Behind project was all about too. Sure, we were working to beat Bush, but MoveOn's field organizers' and volunteers' hard work meant that we were also able to reach people who might not have been in MoveOn's email networks and get them involved in political action. Many of those people got involved in politics for the first time when someone knocked on their door during Leave No Voter Behind - and remain involved in MoveOn's efforts to win the 2006 elections, get big oil out of Congress, save NPR and PBS, and generally make this a better world! If this isn't movement building, I don't know what is.

Greg may not know about all the organizers currently in the field running Operation Democracy. He may not know how many active MoveOn volunteers first got recruited through LNVB. He may not trust MoveOn's numbers (though I don't understand why not - in my office in Fort Lauderdale, more than 8000 people we contacted reported voting and the final reports I saw showed similar numbers all around the country). He may not care about all the work MoveOn is doing to save public television and keep the internet free.

Doing all of that is hard work and it doesn't always look pretty. But Greg - please get out of the way of those of us tough enough to do it.

As someone who has worked as a PIRG canvasser and a MoveOn volunteer I feel like my two cents are worth offering here.

I'd have to concur with some of the other comments I've read above. Yes, it's not easy to be a canvasser and ask people for money. Yes, the political systems that require the DNC to raise money this way, even though it never comes close to matching the incredibly deep corporate pockets of the RNC, remains frustrating and needs changing (I would argue that the answer is changing our system of political contributions and working towards campaign finance reform, but that's probably a discussion best left for another thread). And yes, even as a volunteer I heard of some of the hard things that went on with MoveOn's computer systems during the election.

This may get me blacklisted by all you armchair analysts out there, but so what? Not a single point that you raise can compare with the sense of purpose shared by my coworkers and I as we diligently checked our MoveOn emails, made plans to organize buses to swing states, and hosted house parties whenever a salient political debate or especially fun action occurred. When I sat in the living room of a neighbor (many of which I'd never actually met before) and watched as literally millions of people around the country who were just as fed up with the Bush Administration as I was tuned in, it felt like I could see the movement I was apart of growing. That little dot in Iowa? I felt like I knew them, like we were all in it together.

When I got to Philadelphia in the last week before the election, I witnessed the power of disparate groups pooling their resources, grandmothers going door-knocking, and often, despite already having given money, for many of us this was the first time really feeling connected to a national movement. Whatever it looked like for you as an organizer, for me as a volunteer, it was a life changing experience that made me believe our people are willing to stand up and get involved. All you armchair analysts will have to agree, that's not a bad way to start a movement.

My suggestion would be, instead of spending your time tearing at organizations that are ACTUALLY working towards positive change, you figure out how to help them solve those problems. Don't fall into the conceit of thinking you're the only one who's noticed an issue, but rather wrap your mind around the bigger picture (like who you'd like to see in office in 2008 and how do we get there?). Because I guarantee that the folks that brought us the Iraq War and Leave No Child Behind have not slowed down at all.

-Sarah

I was a volunteer field manager for MoveOn in the Philadelphia suburbs in 2004.  I used the WAC, I worked with local MoveOn staff, and my overwhelming impression was of a group of amazing, capable people, from the top down, coming together to accomplish something unprecedented.

And I have to say, I thought the WAC was pretty cool, and useful.  Maybe they needed to work out some kinks early on, but as an online advocacy professional (and a grassroots organizer with a few years of experience under my belt), I can tell you it was miles ahead of any GOTV technology I've ever seen.

Political parties have organizational structures honed over the course of decades.  MoveOn built a program from scratch in the course of a few months.  Parties have budgets that are orders of magnitude more than MoveOn's, and they have hundreds of staff at the top levels.  MoveOn's top-level staff is tiny, and I have no doubt that most other organizations, given the same budget, couldn't have come close to accomplishing what they did in 2004.

Was my experience typical?  I can only speak for the 20-30 volunteers and staff I worked with in Philly.  We all felt part of a great team, with a few visionary staffmembers listening to the voices of millions of people and putting it into action.

And the fact that MoveOn has kept growing steadily since 2004 suggests that most people think they're doing a better job of changing this country than anyone else out there--and that 2004 was part of that success.

I would like to offer a really different perspective. During the first half of the 1970's, we "organized" the American anti-war movement against the war in Vietnam. My brother was busy driving giant truckloads of explosives between Vietnam and another country for the U.S. Army. We did not "organize" really. We in fact disorganized. How did we disorganize? It involved a giant rollicking agenda, involving acquiring home printing presses (available Xerox machines were on the horizon at best, so I snagged a Gestetner stencil-based printer, which put out really nice crisp copy), lugging amplifiers and stage speakers around for bands, obtaining marijuana and acid (rather tricky, that), challenging brutal pigs (vernacular for "police" at the times). I will never forget running my ass off through the cafeteria of Georgetown University in D.C., stoned out of my gourd, pigs with batons of baseball bat proportions inches behind me, serious straight, oblivious students calmly writing their papers as we flew past, all the pigs in the word right on our heels.

There was a madness to our methods, but it was very simple. Our one organizing principle came down to this: more warm bodies. We devoted less than 10% of our effort to "organized activism." 90% we invested in the warm body movement. Grab somebody. Get them stoned. Introduce them to their first chick or dude. Get them to go to a band performance. Read our underground paper about the evils of Nixon, et al. Then get them to march, or picket, or lie down on a highway, or go to D.C. We usually hitchhiked to D.C. from Connecticut. Got a ride back one time with a tough cop who worked in Harlem -- and had a nice conversation with him.

Now, we did not take Noam Chomsky, or the others who preached the gospel of organization with any seriousness. We did not try to "influence the masses." We simply tried to recruit the masses! Show them a damn good time, get them do do something, like a protest maybe. Then they were on your side. Another "warm body." Of course, it all hinged on the prospect that some of those warm bodies would begin to begin doing what we were doing, recruiting yet more warm bodies. We knew full well that our protests counted for virtually nothing. No problem. The whole damn Fire Department in Danbury Connecticut put on this huge parade, dozens of fire engines, etc., to support the damn war, So we just organized people to get stoned and go down to Main Street to laugh at them. Told this way, it sounds like fun and games, I guess. But really the effort involved was enormous. But there were tons of gratification just in watching the damn thing grow and grow into the monster it became.

But we had this principle written in stone: If we bring anybody in, we had to show them a hell of a good time, and then get them to "act." And it really mattered not if the "acts" were 100% futile, just so long as they recruited more warm bodies that were willing to go the Long March. To put is succinctly, this worked. We cannot say that we caused the war to stop, but stop it did.

After the war stopped, my brother came home. I can just say that life has not been very easy for him since. Then I and a few of my friends did a stint with "Ralph Nader's Raiders." He's from Connecticut, so he had this big "project there with people going door-to-door, asking for signatures and (I think) donations. Connecticut. Rich people commanding us to get the hell off their doorsteps. Three days of that, nonstop harassment from these well-heeled conservatives in the neverending rolling meadows of Connecticut's lush suburban utopia, and we had become totally demoralized, dunned into cataleptic speechlessness. So we approached the "main organizers" -- nicely dressed folks who had that aura of intense sanity on the cusp of ripening into outright smarm -- and basically told them "you guys are nuts." Now I don't know if they were really nuts or not, but we knew they pushing us onto an express lane to nowhere, and we wanted out.

Flash forward 30 years, and now it's 2004, and I am blogging on repentantnadervoter (dot) org, a web site proprieted by this guy named Soto. Most of us there were in repentance for having voted for Nader in 2000, thus allowing the damn court to install Bush in the White House. Actually, I had not voted for Nader at all, but for Gore, having learned my lesson 30 years before. I was shocked to find that there were tons of others who had had previously experienced similar disasters with Nader and is Raiders, and would never vote for him. I have nothing against Nader, except that his nutty "campaign" had affected me like a whack over the head with a plumbing wrench. He would have garnered 10 times as many votes had he not allowed so many folks to experience that pathetic mission into those benighted fat-cat suburbs.

So I ended up taking up about half the bandwidth of repentantnadervoter (dot) org for in-depth rants against the evils of computer voting. And my assessment now is that they were rather prophetic, and will come to be seen as even more prophetic in the months ahead.

These days, I blog a lot. One thing I do, that everyone else seems to be neglecting. I try to keep bringing in warm bodies, regardless of their potential as organizers. I avoid giving "1s" to comments, because, to me, holding on to all the warm bodies is crucial. If someone with scant talent for writing contributes a lousy diary entry that still represents a good effort, relative to their slight talent or inexperience, that diary gets my recommend. Maybe it's not a great post, but by recommending it I am reaching out for yet another warm body that is likely ready for the coming Long March. So far, it looks like I am the only one around here who does this kind of hand-holding.

Greg,

The title of this post does not accurately reflect the body of the post.

I agree with you on all this.

The saddest thing I have discovered while examining this issue is the fact that the PIRG office in LA actually UNIONIZED and then the PIRG management has basically shut down that office. We can all agree that everyone that works for GCI and other paid positions doing grassroots "organizing" work over 8 hours a day. My grandfather knew something about organizing and helped to organizing and unionize and helped to make sure that we all had an 8 hour work day. We have forgotten something since those days. Since I can't support a company in India that hires child labor and I don't shop at Wal-mart because of their bad labor practices then I certainly can't support GCI or other "progressive" organizations that are exploiting workers in this country. The saddest part is that the Democratic Party is complicit in these labor practices.

(I worked for PIRG in the early 90s and found the conditions to be EXACTLY as you described them, even then. It was only about the money.)

I understand that many people volunteer their time for campaigns and organizations. That is great and should be encouraged, but these organizations are not doing that. These organizations are hiring people. They should be responsible for their bad practices just like Wal-mart and any other employer.

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.  

The entire project seems warped. First of all, what are these organizers organizing, exactly? Are they asking people for donations. A cash donation will never be worth 5% of it's equivalent value in satisfying effort. If they are trying to collect donations, I think that is nuts, since even fire departments get severe blowback for paid- donation seeking practices. Another problem is hiring people at all for grassroots campaigns. Do that, and you automatically lose most of the value of the campaign itself. An even bigger issue is that I cannot begin to imagine how there can be enough money to hire bussloads of organizers. Maybe you can do that if you have giant corporations backing you, otherwise, I don't think so. Why not just let the Republicans get tarred with that? They will always have far more money when the money counts.

I have never seen any action be effective for longer than a week where there was not enough democracy for it's organizers to modify the program by consensus at a group level of about 50. It seems obvious that once you've actually hired something like Grassroots Campaigns, Inc., you will have lost effective democracy at that level. Again, where does the money for that come from, and what is the "price" for that money? It all looks out of scale, in fact corporate. Do we suppose that the public is completely in love with corporations?

Also, I see no signs that people were actively training each other on a continuous, interactive basis. If these impressions are accurate, I would not predict that the enterprise would be successful.

I'm not too worried about whether this GCI was for-profit or not. I have run a small not-for-profit, not-"tax-exempt" corporation so I know about that. What I have a question about is how the whole thing could possibly work without truckloads of money. And evidently, they were not paying overtime. And will the money always be there?

Having a lot of people feeling that their experience was unsatisfying is very troubling to me -- it is not something that could ever be sustainable. I had no idea Moveon had that much going on. I am from a sort of "old school," I guess, but one entity hiring some other entity to help it do grassroots campaigning? Way outside my frame of reference, and gives me that queasy feeling.

MoveOn experience rant.

I was thrilled to get linked to the blog on 2004 efforts.  Catharsis is nice. Learning from mistakes is even better.   As Greg may feel, I'm not yet confident that past mistakes will lead to adequate changes.

2004 was my first real partisan political campaign but I have over 25 years of professional grassroots organizing experience behind me. (obviously I'm one of the older organizers that got hired).  

Overall, my experience with GRI was negative, based on nearly all of Greg's reasons.  But, my experience with MoveOn was mostly positive given:

1.  A chance to be part of something with such great possibility.
   
2.  I was in NH where we helped turn a Red state (2000) into a Blue state (2004).
   
3.  The quality of the other young field organizers I worked with.  Extraordinary people!
   
4.  A clear, measurable and workable strategy. (even if it had serious flaws in hindsight)
   
5.  The latest in organizing technology (sometimes too late)
   
6.  The access to an incredible deep, committed and talented MoveOn membership.

I agree with the response of `Democratic Courage.'  "MoveOn.org has probably done more than any other organization to build a lasting grassroots-based progressive movement." I've worked with over a dozen progressive non-profits and few of them had  any clue about the enormous value of relational data bases, web organizing and grassroots empowerment.

My negative experiences with MoveOn had most to do with a few people in `management' positions which clearly didn't listen to volunteer or organizer concerns, or see any value in the grassroots organizing experience of others. I got far more accomplished by ignoring some of my managers directions/orders/suggestions that clearly weren't working in the field.  Eventually sensible instructions came from the top down but not in time to help some of the younger professionals who may have worried more about their future resume than actively resisting orders that weren't helping them meet the objectives.

My greatest disappointment however, comes from the Democratic party regarding its failure to effectively frame election issues (within the context of national security).  I've also been writing a book (started long before 9-11 and even the Hart Ruddman Commission) regarding the serious threats to our nation's security and what it will take to make Americans both safe and free.  (Many progressives still don't get it).
I remember trying to get this idea through to MoveOn's upper management `issues people' but was blocked by some youngster staffer who thought is was more important for me to fo