Progressives Rising

Speaking of patterns, in the New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai describes the funding for "the conservative message machine" in a piece called Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. He goes on to highlight the emerging influence of Moveon.org and ACT and progressive "venture capitalists" who are "champions of activist government at home and multilateral cooperation abroad." He quotes Harold Ickes: Moveon.org "has cachet. There is no cachet in the Democratic Party."

The People's Choice or the Corporations' Choice

MoveOn PAC has two new ads which you can view here. One contrasts Kerry as the choice of the people with Bush as the choice of corporations. The other contrasts the optimism of the Kerry/Edwards campaign with the fear mongering of the Bush/Cheney campaign.

Something Is Happening...

but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Rove? Last night my wife and I hosted a house party promoted by MoveOn PAC and organized around the movie Fahrenheit 9/11. The draw was a conference call with Michael Moore. We tried to cap the number of guests at 50 but wound up with 85. The purpose of the party was to discuss the movie and to prepare people to make a difference on Novemeber 2 by participating in actions to register voters, to persuade voters to vote for John Kerry and finally to get out the vote. 15% of the guests agreed to host a party on July 11 when MoveOn members will reach out to hundreds of thousands of unregistered voters in key swing states.

We were one of 4,600 house parties all across the country and attended by over 55,000 people. Our son Charlie organized a similar but larger town meeting at the UNLV Law School in Las Vegas. He had tried to cap the number of attendees at 200 (the size of the room) and registered 315 guests before being forced to turn people away at the door.