If we can make 2006 a referendum on the progressive issues that we care about -- maybe it's economic populism, or maybe it's something else -- if we can send a message to Democrats that this is a formula that works, then I think that's the best way to get them where we want them to be. In turn, I think that's the best way to get to a candidate in 2008 who is representative of progressives and self-confident in that.

I'm loath to leave our salvation to a person or the small group of people who are considering running for president. Ultimately if we're going to win in 2008 and establish a broad majority in the years to come, we have to start working right now to prove that this approach is viable. And that means focusing on 2006 and waiting before you start chattering too much about whether it's [John] Edwards or [Hillary] Clinton or who.

But to the extent that you can make 2006 a referendum on the Bush administration or the nature of a progressive government, what is the reason to hope that you can do it more successfully in 2006 than in 2004?

Well, there are a number of reasons. The dynamics of an off-year election are totally different. We will want [to win] a lot more in 2006 than the other side will because "stay the course," especially when your leaders are corrupt and failing to get done what you want them to get done, isn't a very appealing rallying cry to conservatives. But "kick the bums out" will resonate with our members and far beyond.

The second reason is, Republicans really are in the midst of a classical overreach at the moment. I think Tom DeLay's arrogant influence peddling and the battle over judges and Schiavo all are part of a narrative that is becoming more and more resonant for the public. So the time is right. And 2004 equipped progressives with tools and coalitions and information that we just never had before. At MoveOn, that means that the 10,000 precinct leaders and 60,000 other volunteers in our Leave No Voter Behind program are still moving forward. We have a lot of key pieces to the puzzle that we didn't have leading up to 2004.

People sometimes look at me weirdly when I say that we're stronger than we've [ever] been. But I really believe that. We've got millions of people involved who have never been involved before. We have leadership that's been tried and tested, and we now know what methodologies work and what ones don't.

One can't ignore the threat of all three branches of government being controlled by the opposing party, but from an organizing perspective, we're on the right course to win things back.

Do you see MoveOn's role to be one of reaching out to people in the middle who may be coming to terms with these issues now as opposed to rallying, and collecting money from, the base?

I don't know if you've ever played the board game Risk. With Risk, the way you win is to build out from your base. You get a heck of a lot of armies on Australia, or whatever it is, and then you reach out. And if you spread yourself too thin, you kind of implode from all sides because there's no center of gravity. At some point, absolutely, you reach out, but progressives are too quick to skip over the first step. There are a hell of a lot of people who are low-hanging fruit -- who agree with us, who are ready to work on behalf of these issues if they're given an effective way to do so. Why not start there and ... and ... and build -- I'm trying to say this without using some kind of empire-based metaphor.

It's the curse of progressives.

[Laughs.] I know I'm going to catch hell for it. But to the extent that right-wing evangelicals did unprecedented things in 2004, it was because Karl Rove and those folks understood that the passion of the grass roots was the greatest asset that the campaign had; they understood how to deploy that. I think progressives still sort of think that you can get by without that, but I don't think it's true.

How do you persuade the people in the middle? You get their neighbors to talk to them. If you don't start with their neighbors, then the vehicle just isn't nearly as compelling. To have your neighbor come by and say, "Hey, I want to talk to you about who you're voting for in Congress for 2006" is just a totally different experience than being yelled at in a TV ad. You've got to do both, but you have to start by building the core of people who are going to do that outreach.

Is it ultimately about convincing people that it's OK to be a progressive?

Right. Circling back to the beginning, I think you just have to have some self-confidence, goddamn it. What you believe about how the world should be is something that a lot of other people believe as well. I think this is easy to forget right now with a president who has the bully pulpit and a media that mostly caters to him and adopts his way of thinking about things.

What's been kind of wonderful about the last five months is that despite the president's best Iraq-war-show-esque presentation on Social Security, people just don't buy it. And on tearing apart the filibuster, people don't buy it. So I think that we've got some data that should make us self-confident.

It's not that we don't have work to do on the ideological underpinnings, on how to articulate the story and the ideas, on building the infrastructure. There's a heck of a lot of work to do. But I believe, and I think most of our members believe, that fundamentally we're starting from the right place.

Recent Stories