MoveOn

Good friend and crusader for justice Anna Galland stopped in on me this weekend. (This will be a good test of whether Anna’s contrition about not reading The Pickle was genuine or not.) Anna works for MoveOn. I met her when we both worked on the 21st Century Democrats’ Young Voter Project in 2004. She worked for the American Friends Service Committee before that, and she’s on their board now. She’s a really good person.

I was probing about MoveOn, and at one point I asked where they were headquartered. “Oh, nowhere,” she said, with a knowing smile.

Now, say what you will about MoveOn. (In particular, say what you will about the “General Betrayus” episode, but certainly don’t say it was a shrewd political move that makes it more likely that the 3 million some-odd members of MoveOn will get more things they want.) But when Anna told me that they don’t have a central HQ, and then when she answered all my subsequent wide-eyed, rapid-fire questions, I got the idea that MoveOn might be realizing the implications of the internet for democracy in a more advanced way than other organizations. The (small) core staff uses sophisticated research and marketing techniques to understand who MoveOn’s membership is – who MoveOn is, really – and, yes, sometimes to get them to do things, but almost always to get them to do things that will help them get the things they say they want. That’s as good a definition of grassroots organizing as I can think of.

I asked Anna how they define a “member.” It’s someone who signs up to get the emails. I’m a MoveOn member now. They sometimes drive me crazy, never more than when I’ve been working on a campaign and trying to coordinate with them, but purely based on the organizational philosophy that I didn’t really understand until Anna described it to me, this is an organization of which I feel I should be a part.

(PS: This is a dated citation, but here is Chris Hayes' really insightful take on the dust-up over Patraeus.)