In the past I have always done as much as I can for various progressive causes and candidates. I live in LA part-time and in central PA part-time. Because the middle of Pennsylvania is.... well, red... I have always gotten most involved there. Diane Watson doesn't need my help the way, say, Tim Holden does.
Anyway, both literally and figuratively, I have given my voice to the Democratic Party this time around.
In the days leading up to the election, I made so many calls for Call for Change -- along with countless calls to friends, relatives and others -- that I have lost my voice. By the time I went to bed on Tuesday night, I could no longer speak and it has only gotten worse in the following two days... and I don't mind at all.  (At the very least, it will keep my from crowing about all this winning... I have some very conservative aunts and uncles and this laryngitis is the only thing keeping me from making some ill-advised phone calls).

This weekend I had the opportunity to touch Ohio.  I volunteered.  With thanks to MoveOn.org, I "called for change."  I shared my support for Democratic Senate, candidate Sherrod Brown.  Phew, what a relief this was, interesting, inspiring, and sadly, disillusioning.  Nevertheless, I was, I am elated.After decades of political activism, unexpectedly I participated no more.  The decision was not mine; circumstances led me down a path I did not relish.  I moved from Southern California, a place where activism was and is a constant, to Southern Florida. 

bumped - Matt

If the fundamental nature of political campaigning is turned on its head, and no journalist reports it, then does it really happen?

The following represents as big of a transformation as the arrival of TV in politics half a century ago: This weekend, an army of more than 100,000 ordinary voters, spread across every state in the nation, will work together as single disciplined team as they conduct a sophisticated GOTV operation to reach "drop off" Democratic voters in competitive House and Senate races.

MoveOn.org's "Call for Change" program (motto: "It's too close NOT to call") provides its volunteers the same kind of high-tech online console that tele-marketers use to contact micro-targeted voters as report in results. The difference is that these volunteers actually believe in what they're saying, and therefore connect with voters in a way that paid tele-marketers can never. As anger peeks at cynical and negative  campaigning, putting voters directly in touch with other voters is a brilliant strategy -- one made possible only recently by new technology and new organizing techniques.

ChangeGCI is a group of veterans from MoveOn's field campaigns run by Grassroots Campaigns Inc (GCI). We have been blogging to expose the ways that GCI is failing its organizers AND the MoveOn members that it recruits. Earlier this week, we posted a set of recommendations of actions that MoveOn can take to begin to resolve this crisis of leadership. If you find our stories compelling, and you agree this issue must be addressed by MoveOn, please send an email to Eli Pariser (eli@moveon.org) and cc us at ChangeGCI@gmail.com (or contact us there directly, and we will update you with further information about how you can send a message to MoveOn).

I accepted a job with GCI during the spring of my senior year of college.  After graduation, I attended a canvass training, but soon after the training I was transferred from the canvass staff to the MoveOn Operation Democracy organizing staff. Throughout my time with GCI, my interactions with management were much better than others I've heard about and read about on this blog. Working for GCI certainly cost me money, due in large part to their incomplete reimbursement for things like cell phone service--but again, my experience was not nearly as bad as what others went through. My superiors were very civil when I told them I was leaving, and they wished me well as I moved on. But I still want to add my voice to the chorus calling for changes in the model being used for organizing volunteers.

"We must give ourselves the permission to fail."

That is the lesson that my dearest college professor most indelibly imparted to me: you're gonna get it wrong before you get it right. (I said it to myself every morning for a year, as I learned the lesson the hard way...) But eventually, that permission must expire--or the wrong lessons are learned.

In 2004, MoveOn ran its first massive field campaign, Leave No Voter Behind; the campaign was subcontracted to Grassroots Campaigns Inc. Things went wrong, as things always will on a campaign -- and then things got worse, as things often will on a campaign. But after the initial setbacks, we found ourselves pinned under a crisis of leadership in which GCI betrayed the good faith of its employees, and MoveOn's members, in order to protect its contract. This move apparently worked: MoveOn rehired GCI to relaunch a field campaign.

I only began writing the series on Leave No Voter Behind when I had good reason to believe that GCI and MoveOn had simply learned the wrong lessons from the failure of that campaign. I had heard that the damage that GCI wrought in 2004 -- through mismanagement and unprofessional standards -- seemed to be continuing; however, these accounts were still second-hand. That soon changed. For the last two months, I've received a steady stream of emails from veterans of MoveOn/GCI's second and third failed campaign attempts. As far as investigative reporting gigs go, this one was rather easy.

ChangeGCI (CGCI) is a group of veterans of Grassroots Campaigns Inc operations--specifically the MoveOn campaigns of Leave No Voter Behind, Operation Democracy, and Call for Change, as well as former high-level GCI staff who were with the company at its inception (you can read diaries from some of us here, here, here, here, and here). We believe that even though GCI is engaged in important work, it has consistently misapplied core organizing principles; we believe that GCI sacrifices the quality of its campaigns for the sake of the quantity of its recruits, and that its result is far less than the sum of its parts; we believe that a campaign organization has a responsibility to honor the commitment of each organizer and every volunteer, and that whenever such honor is broken, the progressive movement suffers.

Upon MoveOn.org's request, we have submitted the following recommendations as to improvements that it can make to its GCI field program. MoveOn has not yet responded. We have a wider set of recommendations for mid- and long-term improvements to GCI's campaign model, but MoveOn's campaign is currently entering into a critical phase, and the following actions have been selected because they are all accomplishable in the short-term. We believe that these actions would bring immediate gains in effectiveness to the 2006 Call for Change campaign; we also believe that this would set a precedent of campaign accountability that can continue to develop beyond this election. Potentially, GCI could become a positive force in the progressive movement; however, if it is not held accountable, we believe that it will continue to squander our most precious resources.