MoveOn Moves In with Pelosi
The netroots group’s support proved crucial to passage of the Democrats’ Iraq spending plan. But antiwar activists say MoveOn has been co-opted by its access to power.
When Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org, looks at the Iraq spending bill that Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders managed to pass in the House today, what he sees is a way to end the war. The bill, which won passage on a nearly strict party-line vote, commits $124 billion to fund operations in Iraq, but it calls for removal of American combat troops by the summer of 2008. The plan is not perfect, Pariser concedes. It does not require complete withdrawal. Still, this week, MoveOn signed on to Pelosi’s supplemental funding bill, citing a poll of its members showing overwhelming support of the idea.
MoveOn’s longtime allies in the antiwar movement, however, look at the bill — and MoveOn’s support for it — and see something very different. Groups who call for immediate withdrawal argue that MoveOn’s position is a betrayal of their cause, and that Pelosi’s bill merely continues the war while allowing Democrats to say they’ve done something to oppose it. Cindy Sheehan, the “peace mom” who favors immediate withdrawal, describes MoveOn as supporting “the slow-bleed strategy of the Democratic leadership.” Gail Murphy, of the group CodePink, says, “MoveOn has taken a compromised position — in fact I think they were involved behind the scenes in creating a compromised position.” Other peace activists call MoveOn’s e-mail poll of its membership a sham. If MoveOn’s millions of members knew the full details of the bill, they would surely oppose it.
MoveOn, which began with an e-mail petition opposing President Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, has grown into one of the biggest and best-known netroots groups on the left. When Republicans controlled the White House and the Congress, it raised millions of dollars in soft money for insurgent liberal candidates and produced memorable commercials blasting President Bush. Now, however, with the Democrats running the House and Senate, MoveOn’s stance on the Pelosi bill has led critics to suggest complicity with the new congressional power structure. MoveOn has settled for something less than ideal. It’s the classic problem the outsider faces after getting inside: Now that it’s got an in with the speaker of the House, has MoveOn lost its soul?
It’s true that Pariser, a 26-year-old who has worked for MoveOn since 2001, looks at the Iraq supplemental bill with a shrewdly pragmatic eye. Of all the Iraq plans discussed in Congress this week — including one by liberal members calling for a quicker, complete withdrawal — Pariser saw Pelosi’s bill as the left’s best chance. He saw it as the only one that could plausibly pass. And Pariser argues that its passage will help end the war. “Let’s play this out,” he says. “Congress passes a supplemental with a timeline attached and Bush is forced to veto it. That forces the Republicans to choose between an increasingly isolated president and the majority of the Congress and the majority of the American people.” The bill is thus a starting point for future efforts. It builds legislative support, Pariser says, for an eventual congressional mandate to withdraw.
MoveOn has long been part of Win Without War, a large collection of progressive antiwar groups; now it is virtually alone among the coalition’s membership in its support for the Pelosi plan. Sheehan says that some in the antiwar movement were so upset at MoveOn’s position this week that they spent a couple of days drawing up full-page newspaper ads accusing the group of betraying its members. (In the end they decided to hold their fire, at least for now.)
But whatever the mainstream impression of MoveOn may be, it has never been a lockstep member of the idealistic, activist left. It may have seemed that way during the years of one-party GOP rule, when MoveOn and other progressive groups fought a common enemy. But the real story here goes back to an earlier age; MoveOn has always had a more pragmatic agenda than its lefty brothers. The group was founded to solve a political impasse in a practical way: When Berkeley software developers Joan Blades and Wes Boyd drafted their online petition calling for Congress not to impeach Bill Clinton, they were suggesting that it censure him instead, so that the nation could “move on” to other business. Not exactly a very lefty position.
MoveOn is now one of the largest activist groups in the country, but its popularity is more a consequence of its organizational savvy than any pie-in-the-sky plans. Peace groups believe in the grand possibilities of the firm, principled stand. But MoveOn has never had much truck with idealists. For Pariser, the bottom line on Iraq is the vote count. “If we could tell all of the Democrats plus the number of Republicans we’d need to survive a veto to end the war, we would,” he says. “But getting that level of support for ending the war — it sucks, it’s terrible that so many politicians in Washington are out of step with where people are, but it’s the case. And so we’ve got to make it hurt for them to support a continued war.”
What precipitated the recent scuffle between MoveOn and its former allies was an e-mail that Pariser sent to MoveOn’s members on Sunday, March 18, asking them to help guide the group’s position on the war debate in Congress. As Salon’s Michael Scherer has noted, the e-mail read like a push poll; Pariser described Pelosi’s plan and Bush’s opposition to it, and made only cursory mention of progressives’ concerns. He did not describe plans floated by members of the House’s Out of Iraq Caucus that would have funded a quick withdrawal from Iraq. “Should we support or oppose the Democrats’ plan?” Pariser asked in the e-mail. Slightly more than a hundred thousand MoveOn members voted in the poll. The vast majority — 84.6 percent — sided with “the Democrats.”
“It reads like a Soviet ballot,” says John Stauber, the founder of the Center for Media & Democracy, whose harsh indictment of MoveOn’s survey has been a hot item on lefty blogs this week. If Pariser had more thoroughly educated members about all of the positions in the debate, many would have voted against the Pelosi plan, Stauber says. More important, MoveOn could have helped the chances of an amendment by Reps. Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters and Lynn Woolsey, leaders of the Out of Iraq Caucus, that called for withdrawal of all troops by the end of 2007. “They could have put out an alert to 3.2 million people across the country and said, ‘If you do anything tomorrow, get up and call your representatives and tell them to support the Lee Amendment,’” insists CodePink’s Gail Murphy. “They’ve got millions of dollars. If they put their money toward stopping this war, we’d have a lot more leadership in the Democratic Congress toward stopping this war.” But MoveOn didn’t stump for the Lee plan, and it died in committee.
Pariser defends his e-mail. He says that the group already knew that its members would have supported Barbara Lee’s plan, but whatever MoveOn did, it would never have passed. What MoveOn didn’t know was what its members thought about the Pelosi plan. “The choice that we needed to make as an organization was, Do we support this thing or not?” Pariser says. “And so I think the e-mail was a very fair presentation of the choice that was actually in front of the organization.”
Pariser also says that his critics have confused MoveOn’s policies with its political strategy — they’ve confused what MoveOn wants with MoveOn’s efforts to get there. What the group wants, he says, is what everyone in the peace camp wants: withdrawal as fast as possible. But there is no clear political path to immediate withdrawal. “Unfortunately we’re living in a world where in order for anything to happen on Iraq that forces the president’s hand, were going to need two thirds of Congress.” MoveOn’s strategy arises out of this parliamentary consideration; its goal is now legislative, to build toward two-thirds support in Congress.
Pariser has previously drawn a sharp distinction between MoveOn and the Democratic Party. In 2005, he told Salon’s Tim Grieve that “the job of a party is to get elected and the job of a movement is to promote ideas and an ideology,” and that “we’re definitely on the movement side of the equation. We don’t want to be the party.” People in the peace camp, though, say that MoveOn has lately found a special place in the Democratic leadership structure. It’s the safe antiwar group. Members of Congress can meet with MoveOn because they’re sure it won’t call for something too far out. Other organizations have been shut out. Gail Murphy, of CodePink, is on the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice, which represents 1,400 peace groups. “We’ve asked for meetings with Pelosi,” she says. “We were never approached to sit down and have a conversation.”
Pariser is skeptical of the idea that MoveOn has much power with Democratic leaders. “I wouldn’t be over-grandiose about our influence with Nancy Pelosi,” he says. “We’re still a group of outsiders trying to create change in Washington, D.C.” He concedes that some members of Congress considered MoveOn’s support important, and as a result, he says, the group held out to provide it in order to get a better bill. And they saw results. “This wasn’t due only to us,” he says, “but in those two weeks the timetable was added to the bill.”
MoveOn’s imprimatur has certainly given many Democrats cover to vote for the Pelosi bill. And this is really the main criticism people in the peace camp level at MoveOn. “The leadership wants to say, ‘Hey look, everyone voted for an antiwar bill,” Stauber says. “So I think the peace movement is being hijacked and rerouted to serve a Democratic leadership and the 2008 political agenda.” But Stauber believes the effort won’t work; most of MoveOn’s members, he notes, didn’t even vote in Pariser’s poll. “They’ve grown so blas&eacaute; about MoveOn’s appeals that they don’t even bother to open their e-mail,” he says. And when MoveOn can’t reach people by e-mail, what can it do?
Pariser disagrees; he thinks MoveOn members really got the substance of the debate at hand, and that they do agree with the group’s stance. “Our members aren’t stupid,” he says, “and they responded in a serious and thoughtful way to the political question of whether this incremental step to isolate the president and the people who oppose a timeline is worth supporting.”
Copyright ©2007 Salon Media Group
What a disgrace!!!
And I thought Judas was dead.
Progressive Democrats of America voted overwhelmingly to support the Barbara Lee amendment and this was communicated to MoveOn in their poll. The only way we can STOP THE WAR is to STOP THE FUNDING. Here’s the article from our website:
Barbara Lee Calls for Fully Funded Withdrawal from Iraq, Enforceable Timelines as House Panel Considers Emergency Iraq Spending Bill
March 15, 2007, Washington, DC
Invoking Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) called for a fully funded withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, criticizing funding for the Bush administration’s escalation of the conflict in Iraq and the lack of enforceable timelines, during the House Appropriations Committee’s markup of the proposed $124 billion emergency spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan. The following is her statement:
“When Dr. Martin Luther King Junior gave his speech ‘Beyond Vietnam, A Time to Break Silence’ at the Riverside Church in New York City in 1967, he said that ‘a time comes when silence is betrayal.’
“He said ‘Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.’
“That is very much the position I find myself in today. What I have to say is not comfortable, yet I am compelled by my conscience to speak.
“As many of you know, this is my first time addressing the full Committee, and I am mindful of the fact that the matter we are considering today is perhaps the single most important issue facing Congress and our nation.
“The American people went to the polls in November and gave us a mandate to end the occupation of Iraq, and to bring our brave men and women home. The legislation we are taking up today constitutes the first real steps of this Congress to grapple with how to fulfill that mandate. That is a positive step.
“I thank and commend the Chairman for all of his work on drafting this bill and his efforts to bring the committee together on this issue.
“The administration is basically forcing Congress to intervene to bring a responsible end to their failed policy in Iraq. Given the enormity of what that entails, it is not surprising that we have differences of opinion on how to proceed, so let me thank the Chairman again for at least listening.
“In considering this supplemental spending bill, we have not only an opportunity, but an obligation to pass a bill that will end the occupation of Iraq and bring our troops home.
“As you all know, last week I proposed the Lee amendment. I am not offering it as an amendment today in due respect to the Chairman’s request, but I still believe it offers the clearest way to end the occupation and I want to take a moment to explain why.
“My amendment is designed to fully fund the safe and orderly withdrawal of our troops from Iraq by the end of the year.
“It would require that all funds appropriated for Iraq could be used only for the following purposes:
“First, to complete the withdrawal of all US Armed Forces and military contractors from Iraq by December 31st, 2007.
“And second, to provide for the protection of those forces and contractors now and during the course of that withdrawal.
“This is a rational and practical approach, not a cut and run strategy.
“The American people overwhelmingly oppose the escalation and Congress just voted against it, it just makes no sense for us to turn around and provide funds for it. My amendment would not cut funds, but rather use the funds in the supplemental to bring our troops home safely.
“The supplemental in its current form in effect gives the President another chance with some constraints, and after four years I don’t think the President deserves another chance.
“Rather than give the President another chance, my amendment is designed to use the funds in this supplemental to begin to end the occupation.
“My amendment would bring a clear end to the open-ended policy of making our troops play referee in a civil war, and it would give the commanders on the ground the resources and the discretion to safely bring our troops home in a reasonable period of time.
“The administration likes to talk about the situation in Iraq in terms of winning and losing, because it is convenient to portray critics of their policies as opposed to victory, or supportive of defeat.
“The fact is that you cannot ‘win’ an occupation, just as there is no way for the United States to ‘win’ an Iraqi civil war.
Watch the video of Rep. Lee’s remarks.
Could we have supported the Lee Amendment without nixing the Pelosi bill if we didn’t get it?
If Pelosi hadn’t passed, do we think we could have come back with something that would have ended the war before 2008?
And if so, can’t we still do that?
I’ve been getting hysterical emails from MoveOn for weeks about how the Democrats are selling us out. Stauber–I called four representatives to ask for an ‘07 deadline…because MoveOn suggested it. Seems like we’re all trying pretty hard…
Incidentally, I didn’t participate in the MoveOn poll. Not because I didn’t open my email. Because I didn’t know.
“Pariser also says that his critics have confused MoveOn’s policies with its political strategy — they’ve confused what MoveOn wants with MoveOn’s efforts to get there. What the group wants, he says, is what everyone in the peace camp wants: withdrawal as fast as possible. But there is no clear political path to immediate withdrawal.”
And what we want is integrity - which means what you say and what you mean and what you believe are the same. FUND a war that you think is a crime!?!?!?
No one wants a MOVEMENT that can’t be distinguished from the political hacks it tries to persuade. There’s a word for the action that PARISER defends - its called LYING.
2008 . .. !!!!
By then, we might have another run of Republican rule and they will be able to just keep it going.
PS: Pelosi also took out the warning to Bush about attacking Iran out of the legislation. Supposedly right-wing Democrats thought it might be a problem for a future Democratic president!!
Why not make clear that we will not tolerate another “illegal” war of aggression against anothe rnation — IRAN.
Why play more games with Bush?
Certainly the Iraq War is an abomination and a criminal atrocity. How validating it would have been to have the House debate a bill that would cut off funding right now, as is so absolutely justified. But how much better off we are than we would have been if the anti-war members of Congress had angrily and self-righteously “stuck to their guns.”
We are blessed to have a wise and courageous leader like Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is able to deal with the emotions and the complexities of the political situation in such a realistic and productive way. It’s remarkable that any bill passed, and this bill can be a precursor to a sequence of hard-nosed political shoving matches that have a good chance of seeing an end to this misery called Iraq.
My hat is off to MoveOn for supporting her.
It shames me to no end to see peace activists going at one another. How dare PDA send me an email telling me how to vote on a Move-On poll? How dare the bloggasphere put out all that crap trying to tell me that I didn’t understand the Pelosi plan? and that I wouldn’t have supported it if I had? Move-On members are well informed people who don’t need the wit and advice of war-dead-moms. If they knew what I know, their sons would never have joined the military. Sorry, that sounds kind of cold.
I remember in the months leading up to the war; the polls showed that 90% of Americans approved of the invasion of Iraq, virtually everyone agreed that Iraq had a chemical weapons program. How many congressmen voted against the war? Four years ago, I felt like the loneliest man on earth. Today I feel like most of America is with me, and hopefully everyone who reads this site is on my side.
The key to ending war is making it politically costly for politicians to support it. You must continue to win over people who don’t want to admit that they were wrong. The Pelosi plan does just that - it allows repugnantcans to defect from the bushits and makes it politically costly not to do so. The democrats claim that they were tricked by the faulty intelligence put out by the bushits. But that’s really not true, it works more like the mob mentality at a lynching. We elected these morons to ask the difficult questions like “is he guilty?” before the hanging.
I served in Vietnam and in the first gulf war; before I retired it was known to me and many others in the weapons community, that all of Iraq’s chemical weapons had been destroyed. USCENTCOM knew this too. Weapons inspectors only tried to stay in country to spy on Iraq. This was openly discussed in the weapons and intel communities.
Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) was always about the oil. $18 a barrel just wasn’t enough and Iraq was causing the instability in the market that forced other countries to over produce resulting in low prices.
I’m done with MoveOn; they can’t fool me. I’ve been telling you, man, there ain’t no two-party system here in the U.S. Them gang of politicians are all together. They’re like a family, and we ordinary people are outside the family. A quick way to stop the war is for people to get out into the streets and protest. But we’re just not the type; we don’t have the guts. Remember how last year the French had mass demonstrations and government had to back off about shortening the employment period for the young? Maybe we people should get some help from the French whom we sometimes call sissy. Look who the real sissy is.
Barbara Lee and her friends are heroes of mine.
But can anyone tell me what good it would have done to get a NO vote in the House on their wonderful bill?
Otherwise, I continue to think Nancy Pelosi & Co. are making progress.
And let’s not quarrel, please.
Did any of you read this analysis by David Swanson on democrats.com
http://www.democrats.com/node/12327
It what was added to the bill to make it politically impossible to not vote for it. Talk about manipulation, BS and cynicism. I suspect you guys need some hard headed political (and while you are about it, electoral) reform. Politics is manipulative at the best of times; it’s compromise like any relationship. But what you have got is able to be manipulated on a grand scale.
MoveOn sold out long time ago. This handwringing now seems belated and frankly a waste of time. They were never really idealogically motivated.
I am also done with Move on Period.. I am going to request getting emails from them and thier constant barrage of asking for money/donations and to write and email legislators.. I HAVE HAD IT WITH THEM AND DEMOCRACTS, PERIOD, I am Now a Proud Member of the Green Party and will support them.. Also Nancy Pelosi sold us out, I am embarrassed as a Mother and Grandma that she speaks for me, NOT in this lifetime.. Myrna/Cross Plains Wisconsin
Why does MoveOn make it all but impossible to send them an original thought or idea if they truly want to know what their members think so they can best represent them? Check it out, there is no place on their web site where they tell you how to contact them if they haven’t already framed the questions to their own satisfaction. Therefore, I think it is quite disingenuous for MoveOn’s management to claim to represent it’s members. The truth is, they represent themselves and try to get some of the 3.2 million people who have signed up to keep tabs on their information to follow their lead.
There comes a time when we must take a stand. The Bush Regime, with the Republicans, has taken this country so far in the wrong direction, that playing for small increments in the right direction will take forever to get close to where we were before they took over. It’s time to withdraw funding from Iraq- period! Bring our children home- now, not in a year after thousands more die for nothing. This was my answer to the Move-on poll. I’m amazed that I was apparently in the minority, which tells me that I can no longer be part of Move-on, they don’t share my values. And the Democrats have no courage or conviction. I’ve heard so many versions of that argument- “we have to take what we can get for now”. The Bush Regime hasn’t accepted any compromise in 7 years- and they haven’t given anything up- and they won’t. It’s time to demand our country back- no half measures.
i’ve been against this war for 4 and a half years now (since the fall of 2002), and i’m ELATED that this bill passed, and so glad that moveon exists.
i think that what this country needs is *radical* change — corporations out of our elections, local governments empowered, etc. — and i also think the dems did their job in passing this bill and i’m SO GLAD that moveon stepped into the gap to get something done. the left can cling so tightly to its emotionally satisfying moral high ground that we become horrible at strategery.
i’ve helped people shut down cities over corporate power and the iraq war, i feel like that’s the role of citizens in affecting change. the role of politicians is to make little incremental progressions — it’s a way of setting the bar to reflect grassroots shifts. that’s what they’re good at and just what they do, until it’s clear that a radical step is needed (i.e. the civil rights legislation of the 60s).
i love the quote from the united for peace person (an organization could have used a bit more radical fire when they surrendered central park to the NYPD during the republican national convention of 2004). pelosi won’t meet with folks like them or code pink because it’s perfectly obvious what they’re going to say. they’re going to demand everything and concede nothing. why waste her time?
until you sustain a movement of 100s of thousands for a decade or so, you don’t get to make demands like that, folks. again, look to the civil rights movement.
in the meantime, moveon’s great at moving the center of the debate a little bit towards peace and justice. god bless ‘em.