Friday, May 9, 2008
In answer to critics of MoveOn, Wes Boyd says that mobilizing a vibrant opposition to Bush's policies was just the first step. And he doesn't blame Kerry for the Democrats' loss.
Dec 16, 2004 | "When we started in 1998, Joan and I looked out at the world and said, 'What the heck is going on here? What's going on when the nation's life is being consumed by a sex scandal?'" says Wes Boyd, the co-founder, with his wife Joan Blades, of MoveOn.org. "And we came to the conclusion that it was because we'd left it to others, and they were screwing up. We knew that the real talent and resourcefulness in this party are not inside the Beltway. So how do we get people on the outside to tune in and pay attention?"
In the years since, Boyd and Blades seem to have perfected the art of getting outsiders to pay attention. And two months ago, you might have said that this was enough; indeed, many liberals saw MoveOn's capacity to mobilize millions at the drop of an e-mail as one of the main indications that Nov. 2 would be a happy day. But defeats bring sober reappraisals, and in the election's aftermath MoveOn has come in for quite a bashing. MoveOn, some have pointed out, has lost just about every major fight it has led; and worse than that, others say, MoveOn has turned the Democrats soft, distracting the party from the threat of terrorism. Yes, MoveOn can get people to tune in. But can it do any more than that?
On the phone Wednesday morning, Boyd offered an insightful, expansive response to the recent attacks on his group, as well as a plan for what liberals should do now. It must take a full store of optimism to do what Boyd does -- to fight, to lose and to keep on fighting -- and there was no lack of it in his comments. He believes, for instance, that the election went about as well as it could have gone given the opposition, given the circumstances. Indeed, Boyd says, during the course of the campaign, the left in general and MoveOn specifically achieved an important political goal:
After 9/11, "we had to assemble a viable opposition from scratch; we had to prove that there were a lot of people in America who were opposed to the policies of the Bush administration." At the very least, Boyd says, the group wanted to show that the opposition was not small -- that half of America disagreed with the direction in which the country was headed. "That was MoveOn's key mission," Boyd said. "Mission accomplished."
For Boyd to declare "mission accomplished" after the kind of bruising defeat the left suffered on Nov. 2 may seem to play into just the thing MoveOn has been criticized for recently -- being too satisfied with the strength of its cyber-presence while ignoring the piling losses in the offline world. But Boyd's not blind to the defeats. (He insists he's of the "reality-based" world.) He just has a different yardstick for assessing his progress. If you believe your society needs to undergo fundamental change, as Boyd does, and you understand that such change is not a short-term proposition, you fight your war as a series of battles, and you don't fret over every loss, because it's the fighting, not the winning, that makes you stronger. This, anyway, is Boyd's theory. "It's interesting, our way of doing business," he says. "We can build a vibrant opposition even if the machinery is owned by the other side because we're not afraid to lose. In fact, win, lose or draw, we get stronger."
Creating an opposition, mobilizing a large group of the dissatisfied and disaffected, was the necessary first battle in MoveOn's war -- and it's that battle that Boyd believes MoveOn has won. Now, he says, the opposition needs to "pivot" toward the next goal, which is winning America. This goal, he says, requires the left to put forward a positive vision, to create and fight for a set of "strategic initiatives" in much the same way the right wing has fought for its bedrock goals over the past couple of decades. Many of the right's strategic initiatives -- for instance, rewriting the tax code and privatizing Social Security -- now look as if they could become reality. "Many of us a decade ago thought these guys were a bunch of cranks, that they would be laughed off Capitol Hill," Boyd points out. "To think you could touch the third rail, it's absurd. But they made that investment" and now it's paying off.
Boyd says he would have liked to have seen the Democratic presidential candidate make the case for why progressives should be running the nation. But he says he doesn't really blame John Kerry for not having done that because he can't think of anyone else who could have. "Name a leader who can intellectually come up with a whole approach to governance during a campaign while in the opposition?" he asks. "Leaders are like the whitecaps on the tops of waves" -- they're stuck in a particular political context, and it's unreasonable to expect them to change that context. MoveOn's goal is to broaden the wave so that a future leader will have an easier time of it.
And the group plans to do that aggressively, in a way that is likely to alienate Democratic insiders. Last week, in a move that was criticized by many in the party (including Howard Dean), MoveOn sent an e-mail to supporters in which it declared, "We can't afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers. In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back."
Of that memo, Boyd offers, first, a clarification -- the "we" in "we own it," he points out, refers to grass-roots contributors, not to MoveOn. As Boyd sees it, for too long the Democratic Party has ignored rank-and-file Democrats and has instead coddled moneyed interests. At one point, this made a certain kind of sense: The moneyed interests gave the most money, and consequently, during the Clinton era, the Democratic National Committee adopted one overriding mission -- to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in soft-money contributions. But since the passage of the so-called McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law in 2002, political parties have been barred from raising soft money.
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