You won't see Adrienne Benson in any of your classes this semester. Instead, the 19-year-old College sophomore is working 16 hours a day, seven days a week for MoveOn.org's Political Action Committee to help defeat President George W. Bush.
Last spring, Benson was approached on the street by canvassers for Grassroots Campaigns, Inc., a company hired by the Democratic National Committee to go door-to-door and corner-to-corner to raise money for the cause. She didn't have money to give them; instead, they gave her a summer job. After working only three days, she decided to take off this semester in order to make a difference.
"It's the most important election of our lifetime, and it's the most important thing I can do with my time," Benson explained. She was subsequently promoted twice, and when MoveOn PAC contracted Grassroots Campaigns for its field operation, she switched over. Now, she's the MoveOn organizer for parts of Center City and much of University City, including Penn's campus.
It may seem unusual for a 19-year-old college student to rise so quickly in a political campaign, but given the group's entrepreneurial spirit, it's more understandable. MoveOn was started by two Silicon Valley, Calif. entrepreneurs in 1998, when as a response to the Clinton impeachment, they launched an Internet petition calling for Congress to "Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation." They soon had hundreds of thousands of people signed up. Now, MoveOn has three main legal entities -- the original MoveOn.org, MoveOn PAC and the MoveOn.org Voter Fund. However, the original spirit remains, allowing novices like Benson a chance to work side-by-side with veteran organizers. Even the head of MoveOn PAC, Eli Pariser, is only 23 years old.
In some respects, MoveOn is like a political campaign. It airs aggressive television ads across the country, including in Philadelphia (for the record, MoveOn never aired the "Bush as Hitler" ad it is accused of promoting -- that video was posted online by its creator as part of an ad contest and was taken down by MoveOn when discovered).
MoveOn is also doing traditional field organizing: phone-banking and canvassing door-to-door. The organization has 500 organizers like Benson in 22 swing states. Each organizer recruits precinct leaders, and each precinct leader recruits volunteers, adding up to an impressive campaign. MoveOn's tactics were field-tested earlier this fall in Detroit and my hometown of Milwaukee. There, MoveOn's voter mobilization efforts in the Fourth Congressional District targeted progressive voters, helping Gwen Moore overcome the fundraising advantage of the more conservative Matt Flynn in a once-close Democratic primary.
Moore ended up receiving 64 percent of the vote.
But while MoveOn, America Coming Together and other similar independent organizations will make a real difference on Nov. 2, that is not the greater significance of these groups. As Benson said of MoveOn, "Their goal is not just to win this election. Their goal is to start a new political movement in this country and change the face of politics." It's about teaching people to self-organize, "whether on a municipal concern or a national issue."
And it's working. As just one example, last spring, volunteers across the country held a "No Cheney Ashcroft Rumsfeld Bush" bake sale. A bake sale may not seem like much, but this anti-CARB bake sale raised $750,000.
Benson chose MoveOn's field operation over the DNC's because of exactly this type of grassroots, movement-building focus. Independent from the John Kerry campaign, its efforts are not about bringing a national campaign down to the local level, but working from the grassroots up. "This campaign is run on an average contribution of $75," Benson says. "I could have phone-banked and just talked to $1,000 donors, but that's not worth my time." Instead, Benson is finding new contributors and making them voters for life.
Elections are not won and policy is not made on Election Day; they are the results of long-term movements. Republican success at politics and policy is the result of a dedicated conservative movement at both the national and local level that has, for the last two decades and longer, been building outside institutions like think tanks, leadership training organizations and media outlets. Through these institutions, conservatives have developed, articulated and spread two basic ideas -- that interfering with the free market is always bad and that traditional morality is always good -- and have built a highly effective popular movement that has shaped the opinion of the electorate and helped Republicans win elections.
For a long time, the progressive message has been highly divided among different issue advocacy groups. MoveOn and other independent groups, however, are not built upon a single issue and therefore offer an opportunity for progressives to shape a new, broad-based Democratic movement from the streets of Philadelphia to the halls of Congress.
The Democratic Party spends every last dollar on campaigns; this is why groups like MoveOn are so critical. What we need is not a string of candidates, but a movement. What we need is not campaigners or activists, but organizers like Adrienne Benson. We need progressive political entrepreneurship. The future of Democratic politics depends on it.
Kevin Collins is a junior Political Science major from Milwaukee. ...And Justice For All appears on Tuesdays.
