I just got off an online "conference call" with MoveOn.org executive director Eli Pariser. As reported in
ybruti's diary, MoveOn has raised over a million dollars in the past few days to create and run TV ads against Republican congressional candidates. I'm a political novice, and this call -- with about 150 people logged on from all over the country, showing up as dots on an online map -- was my most inspiring political experience so far.
I'm one of about 10,000 people who've signed up to be monthly donors to MoveOn since they announced this ad campaign on Wednesday. I've given money to the Democratic National Committee in the past, but I was really turned off by their mail solicitations: they were overly slick and manipulative, and they didn't articulate any platform other than being anti-Bush. The MoveOn director, by contrast, actually talked about a positive agenda: an energy policy that will lead us away from oil, a responsible withdrawal from Iraq, rebuilding respect for America in the world, universal health care, etc. And I didn't feel like I was just being marketed to.
One factor was that the director, Eli Pariser, sounded close to my age. Afterwards I looked at his Wikipedia entry and saw that he's actually younger. He's already got an impressive resume, though. He also gave a very satisfying answer to a question I sent in about making sure MoveOn's TV ads aren't deceptive -- he acknowledged that intellectual honesty is one of our movement's core values.
Another participant said that he'd considered taking part in an earlier MoveOn campaign to make "get out the vote" phone calls to Democrats in a swing district, but he decided against it because political phone calls are so annoying. I know I'm completely fed up with getting recorded phone messages from celebrities about California referenda. But Mr. Pariser drew a distinction between phone calls from bored teenagers who are getting paid to make them (or worse yet, recordings) and calls from volunteers who can connect personally with the recipient. He said the first kind are ineffective in addition to being annoying, while the second kind have been shown to work. I'm not completely convinced that the effectiveness outweights the annoyance, but still, it's an interesting distinction.
All in all, MoveOn is an organization I can get behind. The DNC at this point is not.