So would you be happy to just replay the Democrats' 2004 campaign against a different Republican at a time when we're not three years out from 9/11 and in the middle of a war in Iraq?

I'm a little tired of the hypothetical -- I don't know what the right word is -- agonizing, hand-wringing over what we should or shouldn't have done. When I woke up on Nov. 3, the feeling that I had was that while it was a real blow, it was also a moment of extraordinary opportunity to get some of the things right that the campaign showed were wrong. One of those things is that Kerry not only had to cobble together a presidential campaign but actually make the ideas for that campaign, all in the space of the six months leading up to the election.

All while under attack from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Exactly -- while responding to the president's punishing assault. I think he may have done the best job he could given what he had to start with. The opportunity we have now is to recognize that there's an infrastructure that needs to be built, a movement that needs to be fed and nourished and tended to that will ensure that whoever is the candidate in 2008 or 2012 doesn't end up in that same predicament.

Is having Howard Dean in place as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee important to that work?

Admitting that there are some problems is the first step to recovery. I see Dean's chairmanship as a tacit acknowledgment that the party really needs to do some work. But, again, I think it's dangerous to look toward one person or a handful of people, whoever they are, to build a strong progressive movement. A movement requires a lot of people and a lot of joint responsibility if it's going to succeed.

How do you draw the lines of responsibility between what the DNC can do and what MoveOn can do in that movement?

I do draw a distinction between a movement and a party. One of the books I've been reading recently, which I found really interesting, is Richard Viguerie's book "America's Right Turn." If you simply substitute "progressive" for "conservative," it offers a pretty good road map of how to think about these issues. His basic point is that the job of a party is to get elected and the job of a movement is to promote ideas and an ideology. And unless the movement kind of understands that that's its role -- and not getting elected -- and unless the party understands what its relationship is to the movement, you kind of end up with a muddle. Which is not to say that it may not be strategic sometimes for the movement to back candidates who are not precisely in line with its ideology.

At MoveOn, we're the outsiders. We're definitely on the movement side of the equation. We don't want to be the party. We want to be the people on the outside keeping the party accountable to its best self.

But how do you square that with what you said in that infamous e-mail message about "buying" and "owning" the Democratic Party? Would you like to have those words back?

No. The mistake I made wasn't saying, "We, the people, bought it, own it, are taking it back." The point of that statement was that the Democratic Party is in a transformative moment right now where it can shift its allegiance from the large donors and corporate special interests that have been a part of it for some time and back toward the small donors who are really now the primary funders of the party. So the "we" there was -- someone had to speak on behalf of all these people who put $300 million in small donations into various entities to help elect Kerry, and who were being dismissed or ignored by some of the powers that be.

And with Dean's election as DNC chairman, do you feel that the "we" have taken the party back?

I do think that the "we" -- almost, the "they" -- have started to do that. But it's a long process. Taking the party back happens partly at the DNC chair level and partly at the grass-roots level in local meetings in towns across the country. And unless you work it from both sides, I don't know that you get there.

To the extent that the job of "the movement" is about ideology, what is MoveOn doing to build a positive agenda now? Obviously, so much of what's going on now is negative -- opposition to Bush's judicial nominees, opposition to his Social Security proposal ...

Let me just say first that a positive agenda is really important -- it's something we're going to devote a lot of time to with our members this summer. But we also need not be ashamed of stepping in at a moment when the nation needs us to stop some of these basic assaults to democracy and to the New Deal. Another part of the Republican frame that I think folks are to some degree internalizing is that opposition is inherently bad. I don't believe that's the case when someone is attempting to dismantle the basic functions of a democracy.

I think that the fact that [Democrats] have been holding the line on Social Security and judges is an accomplishment that we ought not dismiss. We could find ourselves in a much bleaker situation now had things gone slightly differently. What the last four months have been about is [like] Mongol hordes at the gates and a lot of people stepping up to man the barricades.

I know that you haven't talked with or heard from MoveOn's members about what the affirmative agenda ought to be, but in your mind, what does an agenda that is meaningful and can win elections look like?

A lot of people are having these conversations in different places -- about what we stand for, who we are, what we do. One of the problems is that most of the power brokers having those conversations aren't really having them with anyone who's out there in the country actually trying to live. So our plan this summer is to get people together in house parties across the country who are real Americans, and who can help figure out and polish some of these questions in ways that people locked up inside the Beltway can't.

My gut [tells me] that at the heart of what the party stands for is sticking up for the little guy in a bunch of different forms. And part of what has caused the Democratic Party to drift away from that is the influence of corporate money.

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