Troops Rally For Regime Change Battle

Super Tuesday was John Kerry's Rubicon. The furious, but not so fast general presidential contest began, in all its excessive glory and gore. While George W. Bush made his disingenuous congratulatory phone call to Kerry on Tuesday, the president's campaign was working to churn out the beginning of millions of dollars of television and radio ads that will try to negatively define John Kerry for swing voters in a number of key states. Kerry, for his part, didn't hesitate to set the tenor of his campaign -- his victory speech ripped Bush on health care, jobs and national security, and charged the administration with having "the most inept, reckless, and ideological foreign policy in modern history."

Meanwhile, the online advocacy group MoveOn.org, intent on covering Kerry's back, shifted its three-tier operation into high gear. It urged its members to open their wallets and contribute to the Kerry campaign, and MoveOn PAC asked members to become campaign activists and pledge a certain number of hours per week reaching out to potential voters on the web, telephone, and in face-to-face conversations. (On March 5, that number had reached 6,677,580 hours.) And the MoveOn.org Voter Fund (the organization's 527 arm) launched the first shot in a new volley of television ads critical of Bush's policies slated to air throughout the 17 battleground states (those decided by fewer than 6 percentage points in 2000).

MoveOn is now over two million people strong in the United States. This number is unprecedented in the history of hands-on activist organizations with the freedom to operate in political campaigns. As MoveOn itself points out: "We're bigger than the Christian Coalition at its peak. To put it another way, one in every 146 Americans is now a MoveOn member. And we're still growing fast."

MoveOn is joined in its work by a range of others, including America Coming Together (ACT) and the Media Fund, which are both supported by labor union SEIU, Sierra Club, Emily's List, and high-powered donors. Other groups are doing non-partisan voter registration and education work, including the progressive coalition America Votes, Women Vote! Project, Russell Simmons' Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, League Of Young Voters, National Voice and hundreds of other voter registration, grassroots and advocacy groups. Collectively they all make up the diverse army that can be defined as the "regime change movement."

Partisan groups like MoveOn.org Voter Fund and ACT did not endorse a candidate in the primary. In the spirit of Anybody But Bush Again, they waited for a potential nominee to emerge, and now that he has, they are firmly behind him and digging in for the big fight.

As journalist Christopher Hayes wrote in January, "Issue advocacy and voter contact in an election year is nothing new, but never before have progressive groups come together to coordinate their efforts, pool their resources and collectively execute the program."

Power Of The 527s

Because of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation, and the progressive movement coming alive in recent years -- much as the Christian Coalition did in the '80s and '90s -- this election has a new dynamic.

McCain-Feingold indirectly empowered the Democrats' progressive base, since it moved much of the soft money (unregulated money, in contrast to the $2,000 personal limit for each candidate) out of the Democratic and Republican parties. Into the breach stepped the 527s, which operate independently of parties and candidates, but are powerful anti-Bush forces and have been well-funded by progressive philanthropists such as George Soros and Peter Lewis, and labor unions like AFSCME and SEIU. (There are some Republican 527s, but they are not nearly as developed at this stage.)