Troops Rally For Regime Change Battle

By Don Hazen and Tai Moses, AlterNet

<http://www.alternet.org/story.html?...>

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.

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, the
Sierra Club and 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
and grassroots and advocacy groups. Collectively they
all make up the diverse army that can be defined as the
"regime change movement."

None of the partisan groups like MoveOn or ACT endorsed
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.)

These 527s are controversial; in part because
Republicans see how progressives, with the help of big
donors, have created an infrastructure that can do
battle while Kerry gets his funding legs over the next
month. Kerry spent his war chest winning the primaries
and finished with just $2 million in the bank, while the
Bush campaign intends to spend at least $100 million
before the political conventions this summer. Kerry
announced his intention to raise $80 million to compete
with Bush. After the conventions each candidate will
receive $75 million in matching federal funds.

The Federal Election Commission has issued complicated
rules for potentially restricting the activities of the
527s, but there is a heated debate about what McCain-
Feingold stipulated and how the rules should be applied.
Stay tuned, because this topic will be bouncing around
for the next month or two.

Kerry the Contender

In the meantime, the various factions of the regime
change movement are hard at work. Besides covering the
Kerry campaign with television ad buys and registering
voters in key states, MoveOn et al. play another
important role; they can help to keep the candidate
honest and work to create an infrastructure that will
hopefully support Kerry after he is elected and
presumably hold him accountable when the pressures from
corporate interests mount.

It was on the steam of progressive support that the
Massachusetts senator, over the last six months, morphed
from Candidate Kerry into Kerry the Contender. Any guy
who blazes through the primary season the way John Kerry
has is bound to walk with a spring in his step. But will
Kerry be able to keep his spine straight when the going
gets tough?

As John Nichols wrote in the Nation, the DLC will lean
on Kerry to soften his rhetoric, hoping to make him more
palatable to moderates. "With the nomination fight
winding down, Kerry will be pressured to devolve toward
the cautious centrism that characterized the early,
’going nowhere fast’ stage of his campaign." That would
be a shame, and poor strategy, too. What the Democratic
Party needs is a good strong streak of populist outrage,
and the regime change movement is counting on it. Kerry
should heed Nichols’ reminder that, "when he started
evolving into a more aggressive and progressive
candidate, he started winning."

Which Side Are You On?

No one is fooling themselves that the mission will be
easy. The next eight months will essentially be a nasty
war in which advertisements and media coverage are the
bombs, while grassroots voter registration are the
ground troops in the communities and states that are
truly split. Campaign newbies are advised to apply the
"tuff skin" and stay focused. As the progressive base of
the election campaign keeps gaining momentum and
visibility, many organizations will inevitably become
targets for Republican smear attacks.

This election pits political sides from almost two
distinct cultures: on the Bush side is the southern and
western predominantly fundamentalist Christian, white-
male dominated, conservative voter, wary of or downright
opposed to minorities, gays and feminists. On the
Democratic side is the more urban, suburban, diverse
voter in the northeast, Midwest and west coast, who
believes that resources should be shared and certain
rights protected, and who rejects the intolerance of
Bush’s fundamentalist base. On top of it all, the Bush
administration has opted for a culture war campaign,
focusing on religion, gay marriage and guns. The right
to choose, environmental sustainability and economic
justice will all be hanging in the balance on Nov. 2,
2004.

With positions, messages and values this starkly
opposing, there won’t be many undecided voters in this
race.

The Battle Plan

America Coming Together is serving as the "footsoldiers"
of the movement in the battleground states, which
include Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Michigan,
Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Washington,
West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and
Wisconsin. ACT’s mission, according to its president,
Ellen Malcolm, is to "mobilize millions of voters who
will say no to the Republican agenda at every level."
Using databases and sophisticated technology, ACT
workers canvas neighborhoods and go door to door,
talking to people and registering voters. As ACT
steadily adds new Democratic-leaning voters to the
rolls, MoveOn has already made a major mark.

Since last fall, MoveOn.org Voter Fund raised $10
million in small contributions from its members, matched
by some of the top donors, enabling the group to put air
advertisements in battleground states. With 170,000
MoveOn members contributing an average of $60 each, MOVF
exceeded its fundraising goal. On March 4, MOVF kicked
off the last stage of the $10 million campaign, running
TV ads in 67 media markets in 17 states.

In most states, MOVF ads focus on the "kitchen table
economy" - job losses to outsourcing and Bush’s plan to
eliminate overtime pay. In other states, including
Florida, Maine, Minnesota and Nevada, MOVF will run
"Child’s Pay" (winner of the Bush In 30 Seconds ad
contest), which underscores the Bush budget deficit.
(This issue resurfaced with a vengeance after Federal
Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan suggested cutting vital
services and Social Security benefits in order to pay
off the burgeoning federal debt.)

MoveOn president Wes Boyd announced Friday that the
organization would spend another $1 million on
television ads highlighting the growing economic
insecurity in the country. "In light of the
disappointing jobs numbers today, which demonstrate
again that the President has no plan for getting many
Americans back to work, we’ve decided that it’s
important for our message to stay on the air," Boyd
said.

Real People Matter

MoveOn has demonstrated forcefully - as did the Dean
campaign - that real people still matter in American
politics. Small donors have the clout to undermine the
most corrupt elements of American politics, in which
political giving is almost always a quid pro quo;
corporate lobbyists trade money for policy favors and
the wealthy for access to politicians.

As MoveOn is the first to point out, this tidal wave of
engagement and activism isn’t exclusive to them.
Virtually every progressive group, from Greenpeace to
the ACLU, has seen an increase in membership and
donations. Circulation of progressive magazines are way
up, while web traffic to independent news sites is
through the roof. President Bush said he was a uniter,
and he was right; he is uniting people across America to
fight to get their country back.

The new democratic groundswell draws its strength from
the hopes of millions of people, standing up and taking
action for a better country and a better world. They
refuse to let lobbyists, attack politics and fear-
mongering destroy America’s democracy. Against the
courage and conviction of such people, even Karl Rove
and Bush’s $100 million campaign fund don’t look so
daunting.

Don Hazen is executive editor of AlterNet, currently on
leave. Tai Moses is senior editor of AlterNet.