Roger Hickey
As Howard Dean ended his 2004 presidential campaign, he promised his supporters that the powerful activist citizen force that propelled his candidacy and shook up the Democratic race for the Presidency would live on. On March 18 Dean will announce plans for a new organization "to focus our nationwide grass-roots campaign on transforming the Democratic Party and changing America."
Every progressive should hope that the smart and dedicated people who organized the Dean campaign can now put together a coherent organization that will inspire a good portion of the 600,000 people who were part of that crusade to carry on their kind of politics. But even if Dean were to retire to the life of a Vermont doctor tomorrow and former campaign manager Joe Trippi decided to cash out as a corporate marketing consultant, we can be sure that the insurgent "people-power" force that fueled the Dean campaign will live on and grow. How do we know this? Because the Dean campaign didn't create this new citizen insurgency. Dean was as much a creation of it as he was its organizer. Trippi was smart enough to notice""and to convince Dean to offer himself to that movement as their candidate, transforming the fortunes of what started as the quixotic, long-shot quest by a small state governor for the Democratic nomination into a 600,000-strong grassroots political crusade and fundraising dynamo that for a while seemed unstoppable.
On the day before Dean pulled the plug on his candidacy for president, MoveOn.org sent out an e-mail announcing that membership in that vibrant nation-wide activist organization is now over two million people strong in the United States""larger than the Christian Coalition at its peak. "To put it another way," they said, "one in every 146 Americans is now a MoveOn member. And we're still growing fast." Even if the remnants of the Dean campaign never come back together, MoveOn will continue to grow as a political force, with a significant overlap of both issues and supporters. And it was MoveOn, along with other progressive groups like the Campaign for America's Future and Win Without War, that helped to pull together and give voice to the millions of grassroots progressives who, in 2002 and early 2003, were looking for an outspoken political leader unafraid to stand up to George W. Bush""on the war in Iraq and on domestic economic issues""even though the official Democratic Party didn't seem to want that kind of candidate. Howard Dean responded, and the rest is history.
Dean has declared that the first priority of his post-candidate organization remains defeating George W. Bush in November, and he is calling on his supporters to join him in "doing everything we can to support the Democrats this fall." Dean has since embraced John Kerry and will clearly campaign, raise money and encourage his followers to vote for John Kerry for president. This mission has been made all the more important by Ralph Nader's exasperating (and very sad) announcement on February 22 that he plans to play the third party spoiler role once again this year. Clearly Nader's fantasy is to rally and lead the "Deaniacs" down another path""to political suicide. But just as Nader obviously fails to understand the dominant spirit of "anybody but Bush" unity now shared by progressive activists after four years of an extreme conservative (who Nader helped elect) in the White House, he also has no clue about the exciting and empowering sense of achievement shared by participants in the Dean campaign's crusade to challenge and change the Democratic party.
A Force To Be Reckoned With
In late February, the Dean blog started urging Dean supporters to "organize at least 100 Town Meetings around the country on March 18""when Dean announces the next phase of what you've created." About the same time, loyal members of the Dean network were challenged by one of Dean's regular bloggers, Zephyr Teachout, to "send a strong message to the party and media by demonstrating that you are . . . serious about taking back the soul of the Democratic Party by recruiting and identifying 100 new Democratic office seekers inspired by Dean." Within a week, Teachout was reporting, "You not only met the goal, you passed it"""by reporting 110 Dean-inspired candidates. It is not clear she was talking about candidates who have already announced for some public office, or whether the number includes Dean supporters who have just decided to run for office-whenever the time and the office are right. But it seems likely that, in addition to defeating George W. Bush, another immediate mission of the new organization will be recruiting and (presumably) supporting candidates for public office""state, local and national. "Democracy is messy, but it is more than worth it," Teachout declared. "You are going to make that donkey fly."
Of course, as it moves from a presidential candidacy to take on new projects, the reborn Dean operation is bound to be taking on roles that other organizations are already doing. Progressive Majority PAC is already not only raising funds for progressive candidates, they have also launched PROPAC, an aggressive program to recruit, train and elect the next generation of candidates for Congress and other offices. And the MoveOn.org PAC, created very shortly after the creation of MoveOn.org, was created so that like-minded, concerned citizens can aggregate their contributions with others to influence the outcome of congressional elections, and in turn, the balance of power in Washington, D.C. Through the MoveOn.org PAC, more than 10,000 everyday Americans together contributed more than $2 million to key congressional campaigns in the 2000 election, and more than $3.5 million in 2002 election. And they have only just begun to solicit political contributions for 2004 races.
The MoveOn Model For Success
The new Dean organization, heretofore devoted to building support and raising money for one candidate, now has a lot to learn from the broader progressive movement""and most notably from MoveOn.org. They could do worse than to adapt the many ways MoveOn has learned to use its network to publicly raise issues in order to engage citizens to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the Bush conservative agenda or dramatize the need for progressive government. More than any other organization, MoveOn.org has taught the progressive community to organize online, employing impressively experimental""and increasingly successful""methods of giving their growing membership ways to make a creative impact on the increasingly centralized and money-drenched political system. Founded in 1998 by software entrepreneurs Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, MoveOn.org, started as a way for people to protest the right wing impeachment jihad against President Clinton, pioneered new ways to use the virtually free Internet to bypass big politics and big media to reach those frustrated citizens and empower them to become activists in a movement to revitalize democracy. They also discovered that people were willing to pool their money, raised on the Web via small donations, to support progressive politicians, and to pay for advertising and organizing around important, pressing issues.
As MoveOn.org showed the way, soon others were doing it""from Ben and Jerry's True Majority organization to Greenpeace and NARAL. Soon the AFL-CIO was mining its affiliates' 13 million-strong membership rolls for activists who have Internet access and a willingness to carry out issue organizing on the web.
But MoveOn was always on the cutting edge, listening to its members and then finding ways to put interesting and challenging opportunities for action into a growing number of mailboxes""and always growing their community of online activists. MoveOn's grew rapidly as it helped to lead the mass mobilization against the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. By March of 2003, MoveOn had not only helped to launch and fund the major broad-based peace coalition, Win Without War, it had raised money and run countless TV and print ads, and, in one of the most ambitious efforts anywhere in anti-war history, they sounded the call and then organized (with Win Without War) over 3,000 vigils on the same day in more than 122 countries around the world.
The June 2003 Take Back America conference organized by the Campaign for America's Future might be considered the first formal audition by the presidential candidates seeking the support of the citizen-labor activist network represented by CAF and co-sponsor MoveOn.org. Dean, Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt, Kucinich and Sharpton all spoke and tried out their best progressive message""much as Republican candidates have in the past appeared before the National Conservative Political Action Conference. Of all the candidates, Howard Dean seemed to understand that this was not just another speech to another group, but a network of activists eager to find a presidential candidate who would take the fight to the president.
On June 24 in 2003, the MoveOn.org PAC held an online vote to help their members express their preferences among the field of Democratic candidates. This vote also served to determine if there was consensus among MoveOn members for a candidate endorsement for the 2004 presidential contest. MoveOn.org PAC had announced that any candidate from the field of nine that garnered more than 50 percent of the vote would receive an endorsement""and fundraising support from the PAC.
In just a little over 48 hours, 317,647 members voted, making this vote larger than both the New Hampshire Democratic primary and Iowa caucuses combined. When voters were asked to choose one candidate, the following were the vote percentages: Dean, 43.87 percent; Kucinich, 23.93 percent; Kerry, 15.73 percent; Edwards, 3.19 percent; and Gephardt, 2.44 percent.
Since no candidate received more than 50 percent of the vote, the MoveOn.org PAC did not endorse in the Democratic primaries. But it was obvious that the candidates with a strong message and those who had invested in internet grassroots organizing were the ones who did well in the vote.
MoveOn.org PAC did another interesting thing in connection with the online vote. It asked voters if they wanted their e-mail addresses to be given to the online organizing team of the candidate they voted for. (Participants could also ask to hear from other candidates who they found interesting but hadn't voted for.) Thus the Dean campaign was given the e-mail addresses of a large portion of the roughly 139,764 highly web-savvy MoveOn activists who voted for Dean. Even allowing for whatever overlap then existed between the Dean and MoveOn lists, this represented a major boost for the Dean online political engagement and fundraising operation that would eventually grow to 600,000 and generate more than $50 million in contributions and build a nationwide Dean organizing community.
Just as the Kerry campaign team is now scrambling to make its online organizing compelling and involving as DeanforAmerica.org in hopes of engaging Dean supporters (and new supporters) and soliciting their contributions, so the new non-candidate-centered Dean network is going to have to learn new ways of operating and engaging their network of activists. In addition to promoting and supporting candidates for office down the Democratic ticket, it would make sense for the new Dean operation to engage supporters in issue campaigns that would simultaneously address the goals stated so often by Gov. Dean in his campaign:
changing the occupant of the White House (by helping the Kerry campaign); changing the Democratic party (by teaching Democrats how to fight); changing the country (by building public pressure for real post-election reform).
Issue campaigns could also achieve another goal:
giving the new Dean organization's supporters something to do: providing a vision and an organizing rationale for activating grassroots and growing the organization.
The new Dean organization, heretofore devoted to building support and raising money for one candidate, now has a lot to learn from the broader progressive movement"""and most notably from MoveOn.org. They could do worse than to adapt the many ways MoveOn has learned to use its network to publicly raise issues in order to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the Bush conservative agenda or dramatize the need for progressive government.
In the early days of the Iraq war, MoveOn joined with allies to swamp Congress with faxes, e-mails and phone calls""pioneering a lobbying technique they called the "virtual march on Washington." They also managed to organize over 3,000 vigils on the same day in more than 122 countries around the world""some cities had vigils on every block. MoveOn has also organized simultaneous public meetings with Members of Congress at home in their districts around demands as diverse as alternatives to war in Iraq, stopping Bush's ultra-conservative judicial appointments, and""in partnership with the Campaign for America's Future""urging on Congress to repeal and replace the Bush drug industry prescription drug program.
Web-based activist organizations can frequently conduct "rapid response" actions that galvanize a public reaction to dumb or destructive statements or policies by conservative administrations such as this one. When Education Secretary Rod Paige recently called teachers' unions "terrorists," the Campaign for America's Future, MoveOn, and the NEA joined to launch a campaign to demand that Bush fire Paige. Within days, more than 230,000 people joined an online protest petition, made public through aggressive press work.
The Fair Taxes for All Campaign was the partner with MoveOn in a campaign to stop the Bush tax cuts for the rich, carried out in a way that combined lobbying with public education. MoveOn was able to turn to their members to ask their financial support to air TV spots that dramatized the costs of the Bush tax cuts. One memorable spot featured the citizens of an Oregon community who resorted to selling their blood in order to keep their schools open in the face of state and local budget cuts caused by the massive Bush tax cuts.
MoveOn Voter Fund supporters have repeatedly responded when given the opportunity to raise money for a media fund, which --combined with matching funds provided by George Soros and others""has grown to $15 million, making the organization one of the major TV and radio advertisers on issues now at the heart of the presidential and Congressional elections. One spot now on the air reminds voters of the millions of jobs destroyed during the presidency of George Bush, who is also trying to take away the rights of millions of workers to overtime protections. Another TV spot""the winner of MoveOn's Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest""has become the center of a dispute over the principle of citizen access to the media system due to the refusal of CBS to sell advertising time during the Super Bowl. MoveOn has also joined with other groups to protest CBS's airing of controversial and misleading ads (paid for by taxpayer dollars) on the new Medicare drug plan while refusing to air a hard-hitting MoveOn ad criticizing the Bush drug plan.
One of the Dean campaign's breakthrough innovations was its use of MeetUp.com technology to hold meetings of Dean supporters in large numbers all around the country. With over 2 million members, the MoveOn community has also pioneered ways to bring their members together in cities and towns across America. On the evening of Dec. 7, 2003 thousands of people gathered together in homes and other venues to watch and discuss an important new documentary called Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War by award-winning filmmaker Robert Greenwald. The MoveOn website features an interactive map showing the amazing reach of these meetings. Clearly, an organization whose goal is to change the country and the Democratic party is going to continue to conduct these kinds of meetings, while learning from similar groups and engaging the members of other networks.
Lessons From The Campaign
Most reporters and pundits have been simplistic in writing about the significance of the Dean campaign, pointing to Dean's innovative use of the Internet to organize supporters and raise funds, as though his campaign would be memorable simply because it was the first to discover a new campaign technology soon to be mastered by every future candidate. The truth is that the Internet worked for Dean because he portrayed himself as a straight-talking political leader""and because he championed a pre-existing mass movement that was otherwise excluded from the political system. The Internet was the natural home for such an insurgent candidacy, not only because it lowered the "barriers to entry," but because it was an ideal vehicle for a movement fueled by passion, righteous anger and visions of fundamental change.
The last time either party saw such an insurgency was in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was defeated in his quest for the White House (winning only his home state of Arizona and five Southern states) in one of the worst wipeouts in American history. His loss was devastating for the Republican party. And yet, in the long run, the Goldwater campaign marked a turning point for the then-tiny and defensive conservative movement. The Goldwater campaign convinced conservatives that they could play for real in national politics, and after that they began to think big-assembling the organizing techniques and networks, the ideas and the institutions necessary to become a powerful force, first taking over the Republican party and then the Congress and the White House. And before their dominance was complete, the newly aggressive conservative movement was able to exert major influence over more "moderate" Republican presidents, like Nixon, Ford and George W. Bush's own father.
The new progressive movement has already pioneered new methods of organizing and networking""the Internet-era equivalent of the direct mail techniques that Richard Viguerie pioneered for conservative politicians and causes starting just before the Goldwater run for the White House. A new progressive vision combined with these new community-building and empowerment techniques is bound to continue to shake up politics in the same way the conservatives did over the last 40 years.
The Dean Legacy
On Feb. 16, on the eve of the crucial Wisconsin primary, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published an editorial which, while it endorsed John Edwards, captured the enormous substantive influence that Dean and his movement have had on the Democratic message. It began:
"Democrats in Wisconsin and elsewhere owe much to Howard Dean . . . Perhaps more than any other candidate in the race, the long-running Dean has set the thematic framework and identified the critical issues in the coming battle with President Bush. Those themes and issues by now are familiar to voters: the conduct of the war on terrorism, justification for the invasion of Iraq, globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs, outsourced services, health care costs and coverage, tax cuts skewed to America's most prosperous citizens and a deficit-burdened fiscal policy."
This analysis gets Dean's impact on the other candidates' message right. But what few journalists have understood is that Dean was the creation of an independent progressive citizens' movement, able to generate large amounts of money and common action""even before the Dean campaign took off. This new progressive movement raised the issues of the war and the economy and openly advertised for a candidate who would champion them. Another legacy of the Dean campaign is that now that this citizens' movement has exercised its impact at the highest levels of American politics, it is almost certain to become a permanent fixture, shopping for candidates that meet basic criteria of progressive message, personal integrity, and ideological feistiness. And a movement that can offer to raise $40 or $50 million in small donations for the right candidate (and proportionally large sums for House and Senate candidates) can be sure that every election cycle, it is going to have lots of political leaders competing to be the progressive champion. Dean succeeded in doing what the editorial says he achieved because he was able (at least for a while) to become the leader of the new progressive movement that is just now finding its voice and flexing its political muscle.
Staying in the Fight
After shaking up American politics, Howard Dean this week asks his activists to take another big step in what has been a very exciting journey, the goal of which, as Dean kept reminding us, is taking back our country. Today and tomorrow, he'll formalize that role when he rolls out his new organization in Seattle, San Francisco and New York City.
Also this week, the Campaign for America's Future issued a call to activists and leaders from organizations to participate in the second annual Take Back America conference on June 2, 3, and 4. Campaign leaders hope that Howard Dean and his supports""and backers of Dean, Kucinich, Edwards, Kerry and former supporters of Ralph Nader""will come together in unity to change the occupant of the White House, to change the Democratic party and to change America. That's a long-term effort that will only begin if we win this crucial election year. We should all be glad that Howard Dean is staying in the fight for the long run.
Roger Hickey is Co-Director of the Campaign for America's Future
Originally published in www.tompaine.com
