MoveOn as an Instrument of the People

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted June 25, 2004.

The forces that impeached Bill Clinton may have sowed the seeds of their own destruction, for it was as an internet response to that destructive and cynical waste of our nation's energy and attention -- and ultimately of too many valuable years of peace and prosperity -- that MoveOn.org was born.

I had an early look at that birth. We both threw up web petitions within a week or so of each other. Wes Boyd and Joan Blades created Moveon.org while I, in league with writer Sara Davidson, produced enoughisenough.org. They were inside the high-tech world; I was someone who did email. About 15,000 people signed enoughisenough. When Boyd and Blades put the word out to their networks, over half a million people signed their petition.

I had high hopes for what they would do with that network, and to my mind Moveon.org has far exceeded those expectations. We may look back some day and feel it was too partisan to be ultimately revolutionary, but these are highly partisan times. From the perspective of April 2004, it feels like one of the very greatest gifts of the Internet age.

Joan Blades is a software industry veteran, having co-founded Berkeley Systems, responsible for the once ubiquitous flying toasters screensaver. Blades served on the Berkeley Systems board and as Vice President of Marketing. Prior to her work in consumer software, Blades taught mediation at Golden Gate Law School, and practiced mediation. A past member of the California and Alaska bar associations, Ms. Blades is also a published artist.

Terrence McNally: I want to ask you a bit about your personal path to the work you do today. I'm guessing you didn't start out intending to develop either flying toaster screensavers or a political action website?

Joan Blades: You're certainly right, but that is definitely where I've ended up. I have referred to myself as an accidental activist on more than one occasion.

We put together a one-sentence petition asking Congress to censure President Clinton and move on to other pressing issues facing the nation. We sent it to under a hundred of our friends and family, and within a week we had a hundred thousand people sign the petition. At that point, we thought it was going to be a flash campaign, that we would help everyone connect with leadership in all the ways we could figure out, and then get back to our regular lives.

A half a million people ultimately signed and we somehow never got back to our regular lives. MoveOn is now at 2 million people. It's been an incredible experience because people really want to participate, and I feel that we've just scratched the surface in helping them do so. We have all sorts of things to learn.

McNally: When I realized what a database you had, I wondered to myself, "Do they go away or -- what comes next?' And what came next was "We will remember.'...

Blades: About two weeks after the November election in 1998, we had a real sense of having succeeded. The results were a setback to Republicans, and most thought it had a lot to do with the unpopularity of the impeachment. Then two weeks after the election, they went ahead and voted to impeach. When you become active in the system and communicate to your representatives, and they don't vote in accordance with your values, your next responsibility is to support candidates who will. All of a sudden we were signed up until 2000. We had a huge response to that as well. In 2000 we raised almost $2 million in small contributions averaging $35. That may not seem like a lot of money to most people, but it was a revolution in fundraising for campaigns from average citizens. That is exactly where we want to be going as a democracy.

McNally: ...and it hadn't been happening before. No candidate or party had realized it could happen. It was basically the folks who had shown up for your two campaigns -- Moveon and We Will Remember -- that showed up again for the 2000 election. What did you do with the money?

Blades: It went directly to candidates. We didn't work on the presidential election per se. That wasn't our focus. It was mostly Congressional races.

The powerful thing about Moveon is that it is not a one-way broadcast media. The Internet, when used best, is a two-way media. We get thousands of emails. We have a forum in which people can post comments and those comments can be rated so we get a sense of what tens of thousands of people feel most passionately about. We also do surveys when we're trying to figure out the right thing to do. We aim to express the passion of our members in something actionable that we can all in fact do.

We asked folks and we got the message that a change in leadership was their top priority, so we looked for races that were close or where there was at least a reasonable chance of winning, and let people know about them. It was inspiring to see how people came forward and volunteered and gave money, and that money went directly to the candidates.

McNally: While we're talking about the history, I saw a television profile on you and Wes (on "California Connected") and something which stuck out for me was the two of you expressed regret that you didn't get more involved during the recounts and court battles in the post-2000 election period in Florida. Could you speak just a little about that?

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7fm, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org), where he interviews people he believes can help create "a world that just might work."

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