The Right Wing Sets Its Sights on MoveOn
By Joshua Holland
Created Oct 2 2006 - 8:32am
In a country ruled more through complacency than persuasion or coercion,
MoveOn.org, the 3.3 million member progressive grass-roots group, continues
to rattle the DC establishment by giving ordinary people the tools to get
involved in politics.

MoveOn's ability to bundle small campaign contributions from tens of
thousands of rank-and-file progressives and challenge candidates backed by
the full weight of the American corporatocracy is causing Washington's
traditional power-brokers to lose some sleep. Last year -- a non-election
year -- MoveOn's PAC raised over $9 million from 125,000 donors who threw in
less than 50 bucks each on average. It's expected to spend $25 million on
candidates and independent ad buys in a full-press attack on the Republican
Congress this cycle.

Since the 2004 election, the GOP and its allies have taken notice, and have
tried, with very limited success, to Swiftboat the group into oblivion.

It began with a contest MoveOn held to find the best home-made campaign ad
to use against President Bush. They got 1,500 submissions from their
members -- too many to screen quickly -- and two of them compared Bush with
Hitler. As soon as MoveOn organizers caught the ads, co-founder Wes Boyd
said they "were in poor taste," that the organization "deeply regret[s] that
they slipped through our screening process," and they were taken off the
site.

But the right's water-carriers were off to the races. The ads were the
subject of Drudge report [1] "flashes" and Washington Times features [2].
Fox News spent days on the story [2]; host John Gibson asked what was
becoming of America with "MoveOn.org and George Soros sponsoring these ads
that compare Bush to Hitler?" Sean Hannity told a guest: "You guys on the
left are going so far over the cliff," and Bill O'Reilly cited the ads as
proof that the Democratic Party was "being held captive by the far, far
left." The same voices were considerably less outraged when the Republican
National Committee itself produced and distributed an ad -- called
"despicable" by Slate's William Saletan [3] -- that intercut scenes of
Hitler's Germany with remarks by leading Democrats including John Kerry,
Howard Dean and al Gore a few months later.

In the middle of 2005, with the Washington press corps awaiting the next
installment of the "Plame-gate" soap opera, which was peaking at the time,
Republicans stepped up the campaign against MoveOn; Instead of attacking
prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald or the Democratic Party leadership, the
Republicans, in the words of a report in Rollcall ($$ [4]), "launched a
full-scale attack" on the organization, "questioning the liberal group's
patriotism and worldview."

At the time, few high-ranking GOP officials were commenting on the rumors of
indictments swirling around the White House. But Ken Mehlman, National
Republican Party chairman, responded to the mounting criticism of White
House political advisor Karl Rove with this non sequitur: "It's
disappointing," he said, "that once again, so many Democrat leaders are
taking their political cues from the far-left, MoveOn wing of the party."

A month earlier, in a now infamous speech [5] to the New York Conservative
Party, Rove himself made waves when he opined that "Conservatives saw the
savagery of 9/11 and the attacks, and prepared for war; liberals saw the
savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments, and offer
therapy and understanding for our attackers." The statement got lots of
media play and outraged Democrats and progressives, but the very next
sentence got less attention: "In the wake of 9/11," Rove added, "liberals
believed it was time to submit a petition ... [which] is precisely what
Moveon.org did."

Painting an opponent as far out on the fringe and unworthy of trust is, of
course, a favorite tactic of hacks everywhere. In a country with an
abundance of "low information" voters and a media more focused on Nicole
Ritchie's eating habits than any serious analysis of issues of public
importance, participating in politics has largely become an emotive act --
all too many Americans vote for the pol with whom they'd like to have a
beer, or the one they think better reflects their "values," however vaguely
defined, or the one who looks better in that ubiquitous and saccharine
family photo that every campaign trots out. The taller candidate has won 21
of the past 26 presidential elections.

In that context, defining who is and who is not within the narrow, sensible
mainstream is a short-cut, a quick and easy way to appeal to people's
values, and one at which the right has long excelled. In conservatives'
well-disciplined messaging, there are no environmentalists or feminists or
liberals -- just radical leftists and feminazis and eco-terrorists. A
Freedom of Information Act request last year netted a Justice Department
memo [6] bemoaning the "radical militant librarians" who were opposing
provisions of the Patriot Act.

MoveOn.org is an obvious target for right-wing causes. The group started in
1998 when a couple of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were sick of hearing
about the Monica Lewinsky scandal circulated a petition calling on
legislators to just move on. In the eight years since, it's become one of
the largest political/civic organizations in the country.

It's a key piece of progressive infrastructure in a broader movement that's
started to coalesce since 2000, and it represents an enormous threat to the
faux centrist status quo that has become so deeply entrenched in American
politics, and to the elites that have long benefited from it. MoveOn.org
does things that only the right has been able to do for several decades. The
organization provide tools that allow people to organize events in their
communities, giving them the face-to-face political space that the left once
found in union halls and town hall meetings but hasn't had in some time. For
years, the right has been able to do that kind of personal organizing
through conservative churches -- especially with the advent of
"mega-churches" in the 1970s -- while more liberal "mainline" churches
tended to keep out of politics.

They're also able to mobilize tens of thousands of members to respond
rapidly to issues as they unfold -- to write a letter or make a phone call
and get on their representative's nerves -- which was also long an ability
of religious right groups and the NRA, largely unmatched on the left. They
also train campaign volunteers, turn out their members to canvass or
phonebank for progressive candidates, organize media campaigns and keep a
large and diverse online community up to date with what's breaking in
Washington. Even more

What makes MoveOn's organizing model so threatening to those safely
ensconced inside the Washington Beltway is that MoveOn, unlike its
counterparts on the right, is largely bottom up, driven by constantly
polling their members about which issues to focus on and which campaigns to
support. To a great degree, that makes it immune to the conventional wisdom
about what is and isn't important (and what is and isn't possible).
Democratic strategists can whisper to Washington Post columnists that
opposing the war in Iraq is bad politics, and that becomes the conventional
wisdom. But MoveOn has to move with its membership. It has active campaigns
for clean voting, clean election financing and renewable energy, all issues
that are important to progressives, but to which the Democratic Party itself
pays maddeningly little real attention.

Of course, emails and petitions only go so far. The other piece of the
organization is MoveOn.org Political Action, one of the largest PACS in the
country and fast becoming one of the Democratic Party's most important
sources of funds. The PAC is the real threat to the corporatocracy because
it offers progressive candidates an alternative to dialing up the usual
circle of big-fish donors, lobbyists and trade associations for campaign
dollars.

That independent source of cash -- a source that represented the interests
of millions of ordinary progressives rather than the submissive DLC
Democrats on K Street -- is what prompted the Republican Swiftboating last
year. It began shortly after they raised an eye-opening $800,000 for West
Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd in just 48 hours. Tom Reynolds, chairman of the
National Republican Congressional Committee, told RollCall that MoveOn
"certainly [has] more money there than Howard Dean and the DNC." The
campaign against MoveOn was an effort to frighten candidates away from
accepting MoveOn's support.

MoveOn sent out an email urging their members to support Pennsylvania Senate
candidate Bob Casey in his race against Rick Santorum. Casey raised $150,000
in just 24 hours, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a
press release calling Casey -- an abortion opponent who many progressives
are holding their noses to support -- a member of the "ultra-liberal left."
Fox News' host Bill O'Reilly said [7] that people giving money to MoveOn's
PAC might as well "give to the Nazi party." John Brabender, Santorum's media
consultant, said that if Casey accepts MoveOn money, he "will have a lot of
trouble in Pennsylvania, particularly in the middle part of the state. The
group will be hung around Bobby Casey's neck." That hasn't been the case; an
average of the five most recent polls [8] in the Pennsylvania race shows
Casey with a 12-point lead over Santorum.

They did it again in the recent Connecticut primary; as the neoconservative
Joe Lieberman watched almost $1.2 million flow in from business PACs [9],
MoveOn.org raised a quarter million dollars for challenger Ned Lamont, and
2,000 of its Connecticut members volunteered for the campaign. After
Lamont's win, both the far right and the big-business wing of the Democratic
Party again lashed out. DLC Fellow and former Bush official Marshall Wittman
whined: "The only jihad many in the left wing in the party are interested in
is the one against the party's former vice presidential standard bearer,"
and Dick Cheney warned that Lieberman's defeat would give "the Al Qaeda
types" exactly what they wanted.

But Lamont came back from a 20-point deficit in the spring to win the race.
In general, the swiftboating of MoveOn has been a miserable failure. The
professional media aren't buying the "radical" label because the
organization has so many members, and because of the group's support for
centrist Democrats (in addition to Casey, MoveOn PAC has endorsed Florida
Sen. Bill Nelson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate).
Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told RollCall that the motivation
for the campaign against MoveOn was transparent: "They are trying to
discredit and smear MoveOn because it's so successful," he said.

For their part, MoveOn's organizers seem too busy to worry about the smears.
I asked Tom Matzzie, the group's Washington director, what he thought and he
said, "It doesn't worry me. When they attack us, it means they're off their
game plan." What's more, said Matzzie, when Republicans say MoveOn is some
radical group trying to destroy America, "they sound like paranoid nuts
while we're talking about issues facing the country."
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson