The Five-Minute Activist
Bill
Bradley has raked in more than $1 million from his Web site. That sounds pretty
good until you consider that it's less than 5 percent of what he has raised
overall. Jean Elliott Brown, a novice Democratic House candidate in Florida,
has raised only $215,000 for her challenge to Rep. Mark Foley. But she has
collected $90,000 of it--more than 40 percent--online.
Brown
has done this with the help of Moveon.org , an online, grass-roots PAC. Moveon first made
headlines in September 1998 as "Censure and Move On." Launched by
husband-and-wife software entrepreneurs Wes Boyd and Joan Blades--Berkeley
Systems, the company they founded, is most famous for the "Flying Toasters"
screensaver--Censure and Move On was an online petition campaign urging
Congress to call off impeachment proceedings, censure President Clinton, and
get down to more important business.
Every
online enterprise strives for viral marketing; Censure and Move On was Typhoid
Mary. It signed up 100,000 folks in a week and 500,000 in a couple of months.
The campaign delivered hundreds of thousands of petitions to House members,
swamped congressional switchboards with 250,000 calls, and won meetings with
more than 200 representatives--all through what Boyd and Blades call "word of
mouse." Originally, this was all intended to be part of a "flash campaign" that
would end with the 1998 election. But Boyd and Blades were outraged when House
Republicans impeached Clinton after the election, so they converted Censure and
Move On into a "we will remember" campaign. Between December and the end of the
trial in February, visitors to the site pledged $13 million and 800,000
volunteer hours to oppose pro-impeachment members of Congress.
Things
were quiet for a while. Then in June, Moveon re-emerged as a PAC. Boyd, Blades,
and their advisers endorsed five candidates--all Democrats. In addition to
Brown, who is a Moveon volunteer and public relations entrepreneur, the others
are: California state Sen. Adam Schiff, who's running against House Manager
Rep. James Rogan; Nancy Keenan, a Montanan seeking the seat of extremely
conservative Rep. Rick Hill; Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, who's challenging Sen.
John Ashcroft; and Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., who in 1998 defeated Rep. Mike
Pappas, a congressman who had gleefully caroled "Twinkle, twinkle, Kenneth
Starr" on the House floor.
Moveon
e-mailed solicitations to the 25,000 folks who had pledged, as well as to
275,000 others on its mailing list. Donors contribute online through Moveon's
Web site; the organization then delivers the cash to the candidates. This
"Internet bundling" is the first of its kind: It is modeled on the snail-mail
bundling practiced by organizations such as Emily's List. Moveon raised
$250,000 in five days and has harvested another $240,000 since, without any
further solicitation. (The contributions are tiny--92 percent of them are $50
or less--but there are nearly 13,000 of them.) This kind of cash can't replace
the $1,000 donors who are the backbone of every campaign, but it's enough to
matter in House and Senate races. "We thought it might be interesting but
probably not really worth more than the time," says Carnahan adviser Roy
Temple. "It has way exceeded our expectations." For Holt, Schiff, and
Keenan, the Moveon money comprises 10 percent to 20 percent of total fund
raising.
Moveon
money made the biggest difference for Brown, turning her from a no-chance
challenger of a rich incumbent into a credible candidate. The Moveon infusion
allowed her to report more than $100,000 in contributions by the Federal
Election Commission's June 30 filing deadline. Now, she says, both Emily's List
and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee are considering supporting
her, which they would never have done without the Moveon money. "For Jean
Elliott Brown, Moveon is far more important than the Florida Democratic Party
or any interest group," says Phil Noble, who runs PoliticsOnline. The only real
catch is that Moveon money exposes candidates to the charge that they are
bought by out-of-state interests or Clinton-loving liberals. Ashcroft and Rogan
are using their opponents' Moveon endorsement to help fund-raise from
conservatives.
According to Blades, Moveon will also add more candidates to its roster this
winter and will begin trying to direct those who volunteered time to campaigns.
And Blades says the organization will ask for campaign contributions every
month from now till Election Day, in hopes of reaping the entire $13 million
promised. But even if it never collects as much as $1 million, Moveon will be a
landmark: the first empirical evidence of the power of grass-roots Internet
politics. Its success all but guarantees that other political movements will
imitate Moveon's style of flash campaign, which far outstrips the sluggardly
pace of direct mail. It is easy to imagine that an Internet movement could
spring up to oppose, for example, Vermont's gay-marriage ruling: A drive
targeted at conservatives could collect thousands of electronic petitions in no
time and solicit contributions for anti-gay marriage politicians. Over time,
some of these flash campaigns may begin to evolve into new kinds of political
communities and quasi-parties.
"Five-minute activism,"
Boyd calls this. It may become the fastest, fieriest method ever devised for
channeling citizen outrage.
