Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
MoveOn's Eli Pariser is confident that the Democrats can come back -- but first they have to stop cowering.
May 9, 2005 | This isn't how Republicans talk.
They don't say that their agenda is something they're "working on." They don't admit that people in their party are having conversations about "what we stand for, who we are, what we do." They don't worry out loud that a description of their political plans might come off sounding like a metaphor for "empire building." And if Republicans had taken the beating that Democrats took last year, they sure as hell wouldn't put 2004 at the top of the list of their "significant political achievements."
But MoveOn.org isn't the Republican Party, and Eli Pariser isn't Karl Rove.
Maybe it's his youth; Pariser, MoveOn's executive director, is just 24 years old. Maybe it's an outgrowth of MoveOn's decentralized, wisdom-of-the-crowd approach. Maybe it's the humility that comes from being beaten, or maybe it's just the realization -- the one that got John Kerry into so much trouble -- that politics may play out in red and blue but the road back to the White House doesn't always present itself in black and white.
Whatever it is, when Pariser speaks now, he speaks with a cautious introspection that's far removed from the swagger of George W. Bush or the self-satisfied braggadocio that marks some of MoveOn's public pronouncements. He hesitates. He hedges. He begins his sentences with "I think" and "I guess," and he's just as likely to finish them with a worry about "progressive self-loathing" as he is with a prediction about future electoral triumphs. In December, as Democrats sunk into the despair over their defeat and began making plans to choose a new party chairman, Pariser blasted out an e-mail declaration. The Democratic Party is ours, he said. "We bought it, we own it, and we're taking it back." Now Pariser says that all he meant was that the Democratic Party belongs to the people -- all of the people -- who support it with their work, their votes and their financial contributions.
It's not that Pariser feels defeated. He says he woke up the morning after the election and felt an "incredible opportunity" to start getting things right. He insists that MoveOn is stronger than ever, that Democrats are in a position to start winning back the White House through a strong showing in the 2006 congressional races. But he knows that the work ahead is going to require more than house parties and clever homemade TV commercials. Progressives, he says -- and maybe he's talking a little about himself here -- have got to get their "self-confidence" back.
"There's really a serious issue of internalization of the right's frame about us," Pariser says. "Progressives have begun to believe that they're fringy when in fact they represent a majority of the country." Iraq is Exhibit A in Pariser's diagnosis; the notion that the war was a "bad call still sounds to a lot of people like a fringy proposition," he says, even though the latest Gallup Poll has 57 percent of the public saying that the war wasn't worth the cost. But it's not just Iraq. It's Social Security. It's Bush's judges. It's a whole agenda that voters gave the Republicans the power to impose even if, as it turns out, they don't much care for the particulars.
Pariser says that progressives can turn things around, but only if they start remembering that however the Republicans might want to marginalize them, they're "regular people," and that a lot of other "regular people" share their views about the direction of the country. "We can't let ourselves get too cowed or too boxed in," he says, "by what our opponents want to portray us as."
Pariser spoke to Salon last week from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y.
U.S. News and World Report says that John Kerry is definitely running again in 2008. Is that something that you would be excited about?
Gosh, honestly, 2008 seems like a long time away. We're focusing on building toward 2006. On staff, we've always tried to avoid the sort of -- it's not even armchair general-ing, it's that everyone's favorite game in politics is who's going to do what when and how it's going to be. We prefer to defer to our members on this, partly because it's the nature of the organization and partly because you get better results that way. I honestly don't know how our members would feel about [Kerry] vs. the other candidates who may be running. Mostly, they're focused right now on Social Security and on judges and on other kinds of banner issues that are going down right now.
Are those day-to-day legislative issues important to MoveOn in and of themselves, or do they matter because they keep people interested, building momentum and money for 2006 and 2008?
I guess I think they're integrally related; they're part of the same thing. I think maybe the question stems from a little bit of a tendency on the left to segregate, in this sort of absurd and just totally awkward manner, the advocacy work that we do from the electoral work we do -- for the last 30 years, saying basically that electoral politics is junk, it's crass, we're going to focus on lobbying and setting up independent research arms and whatever, and we're going to ignore that stuff.
I think it also has to do with the balkanized structure of the left until recently. A lot of groups have a single-issue domain, and there isn't as much of an argument for being involved with electoral politics a lot if [their single issue] isn't on the front burner. But in the end, I think that distinction really hobbles us. People out in the real world don't draw that kind of distinction -- you try to influence your legislator to do the right thing on issues that matter, and if they don't, you fire the guy and pick a new one. Hopefully not a guy, actually.
People in the real world or people who are involved enough to be on MoveOn's e-mail list?
You know, I think the distinction is smaller than a lot of people imagine. I think one of the fundamental problems of the progressive community is this issue of self-loathing -- that we assume that people in the real world are different than us, that we're not members of the real world somehow. I think that [MoveOn's] members and the people who make up the core constituency of the Democratic Party are real people. They have real jobs; they do real things; they look and act a lot like the rest of America.
But how can you look at the 2004 electoral map and conclude that progressives represent a "majority of the country"? The latest Gallup Poll says that 57 percent of Americans think the war in Iraq wasn't worth the cost, but how do you back up that characterization more generally?
Well, I guess the strong and simple message that I draw from the experience of the last six months -- which was not the message I expected to draw -- is that whatever [reasons] people voted for Bush, they didn't vote for him because of [his positions on issues]: They didn't vote for him on Social Security. They didn't vote for him on judges. They didn't vote for him on the agenda he's pursuing. Bush was able to mobilize his base and cast the pallor of fear over enough of the electorate to cobble together a win. But I think we have to be careful about reading too much into it because if a football stadium full of Ohioans had voted a different way, we'd all be talking about the pluses and minuses of President Kerry.
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