I will say that MoveOn and ACT and other such organizations contributed an
immense amount to the cause. I greatly appreciate the time and money they contributed to the cause of getting Bush out. I think Bush is a very bad President and it is very good to try to get him out.
But I thought ABB was a mistake for three reasons:
- It weakens the other candidate when they are perceived as just "the alternative" and not a candidate with their own merits
- It made it tough to convince people mildly in favor of Bush to change. I prefer pushing the (to me more compelling) reasons to be in favor of Kerry rather than trying to tell people why their preferred candidate stinks.
- If the ABB candidate had been a nutball (Zell Miller?) I'd not be sure that would have been an improvement. In that sense I found the "ABB" message a little scary.
I reiterate that I greatly appreciate the efforts of MoveOn and ACT and the other organizations that materialized to get out the anti-Bush vote. I personally volunteered for the Kerry campaign because I prefer a pro message, but the wonderful people of MoveOn started their hard work before Kerry was even a candidate (my volunteer work came after the primaries).
To folks that worked in any capacity to get Kerry in office / Bush out, thank you. As people have been saying on kos since yesterday, we now have a really well established grassroots network. Please don't let it dissolve. We need to keep up the fight.