The Dems' Day of Reckoning

The Online Insurgency

MoveOn has become a force to be reckoned with

By TIM DICKINSON (excerpt)

They signed up 500,000 supporters with an Internet petition -- but Bill Clinton still got impeached. They organized 6,000 candlelight vigils worldwide -- but the U.S. still invaded Iraq. They raised $60 million from 500,000 donors to air countless ads and get out the vote in the battle-ground states -- but George Bush still whupped John Kerry. A gambler with a string of bets this bad might call it a night. But MoveOn.org just keeps doubling down.

Now that Howard Dean has been named chair of the Democratic National Committee -- an ascension that MoveOn helped to engineer -- the Internet activist group is placing another high-stakes wager. It's betting that its 3 million grass-roots revolutionaries can seize the reins of the party and establish the group as a lasting political force. "It's our Party," MoveOn's twenty-four-year-old executive director, Eli Pariser, declared in an e-mail. "We bought it, we own it and we're going to take it back." The group's new goal is sweeping in its ambition: To make 2006 a watershed year for liberal Democrats in Congress, in the same way that Newt Gingrich led a Republican revolution in 1994.

MoveOn has already revolutionized Democratic politics, energizing the party faithful in ways Karl Rove would envy. It laid the groundwork for Dean's online insurgency in the primaries, taught Kerry to use the Internet as a campaign ATM that spews out millions in small contributions and transformed 70,000 online members into get-out-the-vote volunteers. MoveOn "is culturally important for the party because they're teaching us how to innovate," says Simon Rosenberg, president of the centrist New Democrat Network. "Politics is a risk-averse business -- and they're not risk averse."

But many party insiders worry that an Internet insurgency working hand in hand with a former Vermont governor will only succeed in pushing the party so far to the left that it can't compete in the red states. "It's electoral suicide," says Dan Gerstein, a former strategist for Joe Lieberman's presidential campaign. MoveOn committed a series of costly blunders last fall: It failed to remove two entries that compared Bush to Hitler from its online ad contest, and its expensive television spots barely registered in the campaign. One conservative commentator, alluding to MoveOn's breathless promotion of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, branded the group the "MooreOn" wing of the party. All of which leaves political veterans wondering: As MoveOn becomes a vital part of the Democratic establishment, will its take-no-prisoners attitude marginalize the party and strengthen the Republican stranglehold on power?
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To Dickinson's credit, he does criticize some of MoveOn's tactics and touch on a few of its mistakes. Nevertheless, he fails to grasp the depth of the danger of the Dem's current power struggle. The Dems simply cannot allow that organization to become its voice. As Dickinson notes, MoveOn is becoming a "vital part of the Democratic establishment." I agree with Dickinson that MoveOn is a force to be reckoned with. However, I don't think it's the Republicans that are facing a day of reckoning. It's the Democratic party.

Will MoveOn serve to marginalize the party and strengthen the Republicans' power? It already has. Thank you, MoveOn. Keep up the good work.