There's an old joke (was it WC Fields?) of a contest, in which the first prize was a week in Philadelphia, and second prize was two weeks in Philadelphia. (No offense to Philadelphia. The joke is decades old and doesn't represent the city now)

Move On has a new ad that tries to be anti-McCain and anti-Iraq. It  shows a young mother with her little baby who says to McCain, "You can't have my little Alex for your war." As someone who has connections to the military, I can tell you that an ad like this may appeal to the already-converted in our party, the extreme left, but will alienate the soldiers who are open to the Democratic party for the first time in years. In other words, if your party is offering benefits to vets that the GOP isn't, but at the same time we're insulting military service through a dumb, emotionally-provocative ad (as they see it), which aspects wins? Sometimes one, sometimes the other.

Yesterday, in conjunction with over 300 other cities, St. Louis's MoveOn Council hosted a Bush-McCain Challenge table on the Delmar Loop in St. Louis.  I wasn't sure what to expect (some people had expressed trepidation about the action being to "gimmicky"), but it turned out to be a really great event.  Volunteers and the public had a lot of fun with the challenge.  And people were really shocked when they heard things like "McCain received a zero percent rating from the league of conservation voters on his record last year", or "McCain voted against a proposal to ban water boarding."  I left wishing that we could do this event much more often.
(more below the fold)

Have you taken the Bush-McCain challenge? And don't forget, today MoveOn has taken it to the streets. Find an offline version of the challenge near you HERE.

Last July, I quoted from an e-mail blast that MoveOn had sent that framed the Republican nominee, no matter who it would turn out to be, as essentially running for Bush's third term.

What would a third Bush term look like? Endless war in Iraq, continued torture and spying, more ultra-conservative judges, more and more people without health care, and so on ... it'd be awful.

But that's impossible, right? Well, maybe not. Every Republican candidate for president is trying to distinguish himself from Bush, but the major candidates would carry forward Bush's core agenda:

• President Giuliani would support a second escalation of the war in Iraq.
• President Romney would double the size of the Guantanamo Bay prison.
• President McCain would bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.
• President Fred Thompson would have offered Scooter Libby a full pardon.

Now that John McCain is the presumptive nominee and Bush's approval rating has dipped even lower, the McCain = Bush's 3rd term meme has been adopted with remarkable discipline by everyone from the Democratic presidential candidates to the DNC to various Democratic pundits on cable news. It's almost as though there is a vast left-wing conspiracy or something. Ah, how far we've come.

One of the best iterations of this McCain = Bush's third term message is MoveOn's Bush/McCain challenge. The interactive online game challenges you to "tell the difference between Bush and McCain" and what's disturbing is how hard the questions actually are. The success of the challenge as a concise message machine has prompted MoveOn to take it to the next level: offline. Like the Pepsi Challenge before it, tomorrow, people will have the chance to take the Bush-McCain challenge at at over 300 people-powered events around the country.

MoveOn launched The Bush-McCain Challenge to show voters that, on the issues that matter, it's almost impossible to tell the difference between John McCain and George Bush.

On May 28th, we're taking the Challenge to the streets, with tables set up all over America inviting voters to try the challenge for themselves.

Please sign up to help out at the table. Media will be invited, so the bigger the crowd, the better!

Find the event closest to you HERE.

This action is crucial not only because it's going to reach people outside of MoveOn's list, but also because of the potential these events have to earn some local traditional media coverage, expanding the reach of the message even wider. So try to attend an event tomorrow, and even better, host one of your own.

It's easy:

After more than 1000 entries and 5.5 million votes cast, Moveon has selected an ad to air on national tv as well as on cable.

Obamacan - Winner, Obama in 30 Seconds

More here --http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2 008/05/12/1009665.aspx

Move-on or another progressive organization should run a commercial that educates Americans on McCain's relationship with Hagee.   The media is so obsessed with the Wright narrative, that they failed to adequately describe the relationship between McCain and Hagee and a Moveon commercial would provide that needed publicity.We are going to have to run an agressive campaign this fall because we know who we are running against - a corrupt party and a passive press.

3.2 million members across America - from carpenters to stay-at-home moms to business leaders - we work together to realize the progressive promise of our country. MoveOn is a service - a way for busy but concerned citizens to find their political voice in a system dominated by big money and big media.

Started by Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Although neither had experience in politics, they shared deep frustration with the partisan warfare in Washington D.C. and the ridiculous waste of our nation's focus at the time of the impeachment mess. On September 18th 1998, they launched an online petition to "Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation."

http://www.moveon.org/about.html

I'm decidedly in the camp that believes that increased Democratic activism is a good thing, both for the party and the nation as a whole. With more of the Democratic base voting and volunteering and contributing, the Democrats have a much better shot at winning the White House with more than 50.1 percent of the vote -- a feat they haven't accomplished in 44 years -- and thus begin to enact much of the progressive change this country so desperately needs at this juncture. Apparently, though, some believe that increased Democratic activism isn't wholly a good thing, that there are negative consequences to these voters becoming more engaged in the American democracy. Here's The Huffington Post:

At a small closed-door fundraiser after Super Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton blamed what she called the "activist base" of the Democratic Party -- and MoveOn.org in particular -- for many of her electoral defeats, saying activists had "flooded" state caucuses and "intimidated" her supporters, according to an audio recording of the event obtained by The Huffington Post.

"Moveon.org endorsed [Sen. Barack Obama] -- which is like a gusher of money that never seems to slow down," Clinton said to a meeting of donors. "We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party. MoveOn didn't even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that's what we're dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of our positions, and it's primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don't agree with them. They know I don't agree with them. So they flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me."

Senator Clinton's remarks depart radically from the traditional position of presidential candidates who in the past have celebrated high levels of turnout by party activists and partisans as a harbinger for their own party's success -- regardless of who is the eventual nominee -- in the general election showdown.

The comments also contradict Clinton's previous statements praising this year's elevated Democratic turnout in primaries and caucuses, and appear to blame her caucus defeats on newly energized grassroots voter groups that she has lauded in the past as "lively participants" in American democracy.

[...]

The disclosure of Clinton's remarks disparaging the prominence of party activists in the caucus process comes after she repeatedly suggested that Obama's electability had been compromised because he had allegedly offended other key Democratic constituencies.

This is pretty remarkable audio, Clinton attacking MoveOn -- incorrectly, in fact -- for purportedly opposing the Afghanistan War when that was not at all the case.

But even more astounding than Clinton's specific attacks on MoveOn, a grassroots organization founded to defend her husband against the Republican power-grab that was the 1998 impeachment, an organization that is made up of more than three million activists, most of whom are diehard in their loyalty to the Democratic Party, is the fact that Clinton is maligning the Democratic base, specifically those who have been driven to the polls at least in part in response to the Iraq War.

It's not clear to me what it is about the view of American foreign policy held by these party regulars that Clinton disagrees with -- whether it was the view that Congress should not have authorized the Bush administration to commence military action against Iraq, whether it is that Congress should stand up against the Bush administration so that it cannot do the same against Iraq, or something else. I would actually be interested in hearing what that disagreement is.

I would also be interested in hearing more about this so-called "intimidation," if Clinton believes that it is a bad thing that voter turnout in almost every primary and caucus this year has set new records.

It could be that there is a valid explanation for these comments, that they were taken out of context, that they don't really reflect her views of the Democratic base and the netroots, that they were merely the result of the inevitable exhaustion brought on by near-constant campaigning. I'd like to hear it. But until I do, it's hard not to come away from these comments with the sense that Clinton holds a key part of the Democratic base in contempt.