Profit Over People: The DNC, MoveOn, and Grassroots Campaigns Inc.

Over the past few weeks Greg Bloom has been posting an extremely important series dealing with Grassroots Campaigns Inc. (CGI), the DNC, and MoveOn over at MyDD. The first series was called Strip-Mining the Grassroots and looks at the horribly self-defeating and short-sighted "outreach" tactics employed by CGI and the DNC during the last election. Here is the initial question Greg poses:

...as someone who personally hounded thousands of people on the streets of New York City, pushing them to give hundreds of dollars, again and again -- turning away people who wanted to volunteer, shrugging at people who wanted to register to vote, cutting off conversations about what the Democrats and John Kerry actually stood for so that I could make my quota, working sixteen hour days under the false pretense of beating George Bush -- I had to question whether the ends justify the means. I have come up with difficult answers.

And while Greg's multi-part series of the DNC's operations were harsh, his critique of MoveOn, that "beacon of light" for the progressive momvement, is brutal:

A number of times in the course of the series, defenders of the GCI/PIRG/Fund model tried to dismiss my posts as the axe-grinding rants of an ex-employee who 'had a bad experience'. Now, it is true that 'Strip-Mining the Grassroots' was born of my experience working for GCI. And yet, I only raised money for the DNC for three weeks -- they were intense weeks, but ultimately not enough to leave a lucid impression of systemic failure. Rather, my 'bad' experience with GCI and the PIRG/Fund model was in Get Out the Vote for MoveOn PAC.

Now, as I take off my calm, methodical armchair-analyst hat and put on the hat of a young, idealistic progressive who is telling the story of his first intensive experience with political activism, I hope (perhaps in vain) that the impact of the following qualification is not lost amid the din of the blogosphere: the 2004 MoveOn PAC Leave No Voter Behind was not just a 'bad' experience. It was a soul-crushing experience.

...

But I stuck out that long extra week for the MoveOn campaign. I could see that GCI was ruthlessly effective at getting to the bottom line -- and if it was this good at raising money, I figured, it would be able to use us to turn out some serious votes. When we finally got to the swing states as MoveOn organizers, I already had misgivings about GCI, but I was thrilled at the opportunity to work a hundred hours a week or more on the true 'frontline.' I figured that three weeks in the canvass trench had prepared me for it. I was mistaken.

Things went wrong, as things always will in a campaign. Then things got worse, as things often will in a campaign. But what happened next was a breakdown that went beyond miscommunication, disorganization, and Acts of the Campaign God. What happened next was a deliberate top-down action, and our campaign fell apart beneath it. Crucial objectives were abandoned; efforts to fix the problems were thwarted; those organizers who tried to independently rescue their own operations were intimidated and threatened. The human infrastructure was so poorly treated that virtually none of it lasted two days beyond the election. Altogether, it was a profound crisis of leadership.

And in his most recent post Greg reveals what the problem faced on by MoveOn staff was (something that I heard a lot of buzz about during the 2004 campaign itself):

As the sheer size of the operation began to buckle itself under, rather than cut losses and reconsolidate to run the best campaign possible under the given conditions, GCI shoved the burden of that responsibility right down to the staff on the ground.

In the coming days I will post the section of my thesis dealing with my experiences working with Music for America during the 2004 election, and all of the problems that I saw and faced. Though I was focused on outreach and registration, and thus probably had a more positive long-term effect on our nation's direction (albeit a very minuscule one), I still share many of the same sentiments that Greg expresses in his series. More importantly-- as Greg's pieces illustrate, each and every left-leaning political organization had similar or worse problems than MFA did.

I'm not sure to what extent the DNC is still using GCI, now that it has come under the leadership of Howard Dean, but the DNC's campaign to put power back in the hands of the state parties, while enabling them to hire permanent field staff, is, IMO, a good indication that they are moving in the right direction (hell, I even subscribed to give the DNC a monthly chunk of change as a result). That said Greg mentions that CGI is still representing (and making a nice profit, I'm sure) the DNC, so I guess the strip-mining continues even with "net-roots" and "people-power" superstar Dean at the helm.

Will we repeat these same mistakes this year? You're god-damned right we will, as I believe that almost none of the organizations (at least the ones that didn't close shop since the 2004 campaign) have learned from the myriad of mistakes they made. Let's hope that the spontaneous grass- and net-roots orgs and networks that have emerged on the left are enough to compensate for the horrid state of "our" mainstream/well-funded political organizations.

The thought of our nation continuing to slide further to the right (and into the firm grip of the Revolutionary Neocons) because of the ineptness and lack of true leadership on the left is almost too much for me to bear. but given the lack of leadership and accountability amongst almost any of these groups it seems to be a distinct possibility.