Indeed, for all its fearlessness in taking on the right, MoveOn works to avoid controversy among progressives. "I'm personally very concerned about what's going on in the Middle East," says Pariser, speaking of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "That's something that MoveOn probably won't directly address for the next year, and I'm perfectly happy to say that's not MoveOn's place. We intentionally look for issues that are not divisive." Thus you won't find anything on MoveOn's site about abortion, or about guns. "Not that those aren't important issues," Pariser says, "but when there's so many battles to fight, why pick the ones that divide the base?"

"One of the things MoveOn has done that is really interesting: They've been able to engender a radical support for a practical solution," Seiger says.

That is partly because Boyd and Blades, whose company Berkeley Systems was best known for creating flying toasters screensavers, think like businesspeople rather than ideologues. In fact, they never planned to get into politics at all. Boyd says that if it hadn't been for the impeachment, "we wouldn't have gotten involved in politics. But at a certain point, you can't look away. You wonder about what was lost and what we could lose if we don't step forward."

Their sense that American politics had run off the rails began during the impeachment, but was driven home after the 2000 election. During the recount, the right mustered mobs, but Democrats were oddly quiescent. Gitlin, the Columbia professor, held a count-the-vote rally the Monday after the election at Manhattan's Federal Building. At its peak, there were 300 people.

MoveOn was among those that failed to act. "We totally blew it," Boyd says now. The reason wasn't a lack of passion -- it was a kind of disbelief that American democracy could go so awry.

"There was tremendous energy within our base, but we didn't engage because I thought for sure that the system would work, that the wheels would turn and a fair result would be found, and I was wrong," he says. "And we now know that the system, to be fair, has to be people screaming on both sides."

Yet MoveOn aspires to more than just partisan shrieking. The organizers insist that the movement is, at its core, centrist, and that MoveOn speaks for the untapped majority of Americans. Of course the group has defined itself by opposition to Republican Party initiatives like the Clinton impeachment and the war, but its ideology is arguably closer to the mainstream than Bush's is.

"I think there are cranks on all sides," says Boyd. "The cranks are running the show on one side. People who 10 years ago, 15 years ago would have been laughed off Capitol Hill have, through having a very strong, consistent voice in an environment in which there's a vacuum of integrity, have gained ownership of one team. But it's a very fragile alignment. If you look at Americans' issue positions, they don't align with the Bush administration. My view is that Americans are very centrist. When you go out and talk to people, I share views with a lot of people across the country."

That center has been obscured by television, which thrives on rancor and outrage. But Boyd believes the Internet is beginning to counteract some of television's distortions. "The American people are smart, talented, resourceful, all of those good things," he says. "Right now with technology, we can tap into that resourcefulness; we can help play a catalytic role in helping to get these people to step forward. That's what you're seeing with MoveOn. That's what you're seeing with the Dean campaign and other campaigns."

Of course, MoveOn runs plenty of campaigns that don't ask anything more of users than sending e-mail or making donations, but the group also engages people in deeper ways. One obvious example is the "Bush in 30 Seconds" campaign, which allows MoveOn to freely draw on the creative energy of thousands while giving average Americans a chance to enter a process previously open only to campaign professionals.

"We're NOT looking for the same old slick political ads from Washington media consultants," says the contest Web site. "Instead, we're looking for really creative ads that will engage and enlighten viewers and help them understand the truth about George Bush."

Contestants e-mail their spots as digital files. They'll be posted on MoveOn's site, where users will vote on them. Judges will make their final decision from among the top-rated entries.

MoveOn is also moving into the kind of face-to-face community building pioneered by MeetUp.com and the Dean campaign. It's encouraging its members to hold thousands of house parties across the country on Dec. 7 to screen Robert Greenwald's documentary, "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War." The film, becoming a key liberal account of the administration's duplicity, is sold or given away with membership dues on progressive Web sites, including John Podesta's Center for American Progress and AlterNet. Guests at these parties will be able to join a conference call with the director and submit questions for him online. "This'll be fun, but it's also strategic," says an e-mail from MoveOn to its members. "Coming together, we'll strengthen the MoveOn community. This is also a great way to get the word out -- you can invite friends and co-workers who aren't yet part of MoveOn."

In business, this kind of thing is called viral marketing, and MoveOn embraces business approaches to sell its ideas. For months, the group has been taking out ads in major newspapers that feature details of Bush's misdeeds with the headline "Misleader," and the group runs, a Web site devoted to chronicling the administration's misdeeds. The idea, says Boyd, was to "brand" the president as a "misleader," attacking head-on the public perception of Bush's integrity.

Given its scope and the nearly infinite number of projects it could undertake, there's very little division inside MoveOn or sniping outside it. Partly, this is because its membership has such a large role in setting the group's agenda. In June, MoveOn asked its members to interview each other about what values and issues were important to them. About 20,000 participated, interviewing each other by phone, producing 10,000 pages of feedback. MoveOn then hired a linguist to parse the data and figure out which concerns were most widely shared by the membership. The top three were security and Iraq, energy and the environment, and freedom and civil liberties. Boyd says they didn't put them in any order: Iraq was most cited as a top issue, but freedom was most often cited period, and that's where MoveOn has focused its resources. Even the slogan on MoveOn's new T-shirts, "Democracy is not a spectator sport," was chosen democratically: Members submitted more than 700 suggestions, with a vote determining the winner.

It's also no accident that all seven paid MoveOn employees work from home. Boyd and Blades deliberately chose not to have an office, to avoid the cliques that come with any real-world work environment. "You can't have two cultures, an in-person culture and a distributed one," Boyd says, because power will automatically cluster among those working together in the real world. MoveOn thrives in part because it keeps power dispersed.

The organization operates organically, says Pariser. The seven staff members are in constant e-mail contact, and when one of them gets an idea -- say, to use the Republican ad as a fundraising tool -- they're able to get the go-ahead from the others and launch the project within hours, if not minutes. "It's a really nice system," says Pariser. "We all have a lot of authority, but we all check in with one another a lot, and it just sort of works."

According to Boyd, MoveOn's current harmony stems largely from a common foe. Bush has done far more than anyone else could to make MoveOn's base indivisible.

"I wouldn't give too much credit to the process," Boyd says. "I think it's easier to have a clear opponent that unifies all progressives. There's much less nattering going on among progressives right now than I think has historically been the case. My guess is that if there was a new president, the first thing we'd have to deal with is factionalization."

MoveOn's members hope to someday have such problems.

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