Far from being intimidated, MoveOn has set its sights on Fox. On Nov. 21, it announced the creation of "Fox Watch," organizing thousands of volunteers to monitor the cable channel for distortion and bias.

MoveOn's genius for drawing strength from right-wing attacks mirrors that of the Howard Dean campaign, with which the organization is often associated. Earlier this year Zack Exley, MoveOn's organizing director (and the creator of the infamous anti-Bush site "GWBush.com") took a two-and-a-half-week leave of absence to work on Dean's Internet campaign. MoveOn says the group volunteered to help other Democrats as well, but only Dean's people accepted the offer. Now the Dean campaign has grown to echo MoveOn in style and strategy. When MoveOn jumped on the Republicans' attack ad to raise money, Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi had the same idea. He sent out an e-mail to the 503,000 people on Dean's mailing list, lambasting the "fear-mongering that George Bush and Karl Rove are going to use" and appealing for funds to counter the Republicans. "Our goal," he wrote, "is to raise $360,000 by Tuesday at midnight -- $5,000 for every hour they are going to lie to the American people with their ad."

They didn't have to wait until Tuesday -- by noon on Monday, they'd reaped $395,640. And while MoveOn will use its $500,000 as part of a general campaign to expose what it sees as Bush's deceptions, Dean's ad takes on the Republican commercial directly. It mimics the Bush spot, showing the president giving the State of the Union address. This time, though, a narrator says, "He misled the nation about weapons of mass destruction." Then the scene changes to Dean on the campaign trail, and the ad says, "Howard Dean is committed to fighting terrorism and protecting our national security. But Howard Dean opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. He believes it's time we had a foreign policy consistent with American values. And it's time to restore the dignity and respect our country deserves around the world."

John Kerry ran a similar response, with a commercial that makes use of footage of Bush in a flight suit. "George Bush's ad says he's being attacked for attacking the terrorists," says the spot's narrator. "No, Mr. President, America's united against terror. The problem is, you declared, 'Mission accomplished,' but had no plan to win the peace and handed out billions of contracts to contributors like Halliburton."

Both messages were similar, but the dynamic behind them was different: By mobilizing its supporters to fund such ads, Dean's campaign makes them feel like they're talking back to Bush. "This is a new kind of democracy happening right now," says Tiffany Shlain, the founder and director of the Webby Awards, the Internet version of the Oscars. Last year, MoveOn won the Webby in the politics category. Both MoveOn and the Dean campaign, says Shlain, "are tapping into a whole new group of people who weren't involved with politics because they didn't feel like they had a voice. They're making people feel like they can make a difference, and that's real and that's big."

Thus it's no surprise that there's a lot of overlap between Dean supporters and MoveOn users. When MoveOn held an online Democratic "primary" in June, Dean won 44 percent of the vote. It wasn't enough to garner MoveOn's endorsement -- and financial backing -- but it did show that, of the nine candidates in the race, Dean was far and away the favorite of the kind of tech-savvy progressives who make up MoveOn, and it helped propel Dean to the front of the Democratic pack.

Boyd says MoveOn still hasn't decided whether to hold another primary or endorse a candidate. "The timing of the first primary we did in June was very good," he says. "We were in the middle of the money primary," the period in which insiders sort candidates by their fundraising prowess. The money primary, Boyd says, "is a filter that candidates go through before real people are even brought into the equation. The reason we had the primary was the simple analysis that real people should be involved in the selection of the Democratic and Republican nominees. A lot of this stuff is determined before the very first caucus. We wanted to change that, and I think we did."

For all the attention it has received, MoveOn works because it maintains a healthy distance from the centers of power, even as its own power multiplies. Though they know how to use celebrities to further their agenda, Boyd and Blades shun self-promotion; they've repeatedly refused reporters' requests to interview them at home and observe their daily life.

"The hardest thing to get across to the political establishment is that this is not just another set of tools you use to manipulate constituencies and tap them for money," says Boyd. "This has to be seen as a way to engage constituencies and engage in a two-way conversation."

That's been obscured by all the attention the group has gotten lately for its high-profile backers. Besides the Soros donation -- part of the anti-Bush campaign the billionaire calls "the central focus of my life" -- Al Gore has given two major speeches to MoveOn members, including one on Nov. 8 in which he excoriated the PATRIOT Act with more passion than he ever showed as a candidate. Actor Jack Black, R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, director Michael Mann and a host of other stars have volunteered to judge MoveOn's "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest, which challenges members to create a commercial exposing Bush's failures and deceptions. MoveOn will buy commercial airtime to show the winning spot during the week of Bush's State of the Union address in late January.

The association with Gore is telling. Though its tactics might be insurgent, MoveOn's political orientation isn't far from the center of the Democratic Party. The group sees itself as representative of the new silent majority, average Americans abused by right-wing ideologues who claim a monopoly on national definition. Its support suggests just how many people in America have felt voiceless and yearned for some way to make themselves heard.

"MoveOn has been tagged in mainstream media as a liberal activist group, when in fact the positions they've articulated have tended to fall more in the center," says Jonah Seiger, a visiting fellow with the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "Their birth was a moderate position on the Clinton impeachment -- censure the president and move on. It wasn't 'This is all bullshit and we shouldn't do anything,' and it wasn't 'Let's tar and feather him.' Their position on the war was also a middle-of-the-road position -- give inspectors time. It wasn't 'Let's not be there,' and it wasn't 'Let's go right to war.'"

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