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.

By Farhad Manjoo

Read more: Politics, News, MoveOn.org, Nancy Pelosi, Farhad Manjoo, 2008 election, 2006 Elections

Salon photo composite

March 23, 2007 | 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."

Next page: "They could have put out an alert to 3.2 million people across the country"