Tempest From a Teapot

“If someone had told me six months ago that by this time [Kerry would] be up in the polls and unified and in a good strategic position, I would have told him he was dreaming,” says Pariser, calling on his cell phone. “Part of it has been the total unraveling of the Bush foreign policy. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then, from Richard Clarke on to the 9/11 Commission to the Senate intelligence reports. It’s very clear the president misled people, and that creates a very good organizing environment for us.”

As Pariser says, MoveOn certainly isn’t the only reason for the flowering of Democratic activism — perceptions about Bush and the war are responsible for much of it — but the combination has created something entirely new: a left-wing electoral body that is turning out en masse for a mainstream Democratic candidate. The kind of people who might once have worked for Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy and George McGovern — men they would have truly admired — are now working even more passionately for John Kerry, whom they mock for being a bore and sounding like a Republican.

But there is another factor. For progressive voters in states like New York and California, the closeness of the 2000 election underlined as never before just how inconsequential a vote for a Democrat in a heavily Democratic state can be. And so they are putting all their efforts into getting other people to vote in the 15 battleground states, where a vote for a Democrat doescount. And thanks to groups like MoveOn, they can do it very effectively.

The Internet model of organizing really has lowered the effort involved in joining up. Now if you want to do more than vote, it takes about two minutes to figure out how. And your commitment needn’t go beyond a single meeting. You can sign up for a day, make calls for a couple of hours on your own cell phone, and never come back. When the cost of doing something is lowered, there are lot more takers. MoveOn has not only channeled the activist left into the election, it has vastly expanded the size of the available cadre by making it so much easier to cross the line from getting into arguments to actually doing something.

“I’m not much of a joiner,” says Laura Dawn, “but when it comes to MoveOn, you could say I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.”