In my last post, I summarized my experience working as a field organizer in MoveOn PAC's 2004 Leave No Voter Behind campaign. For this GOTV operation, MoveOn contracted out a vendor named Grassroots Campaigns, Inc (GCI). GCI had also been contracted by the Democratic National Committee to run its 2004 fundraising canvass (this was the primary subject of my previous series, "Strip-Mining the Grassroots" -- please read Lockse's post for another valuable perspective on the GCI's 2004 DNC canvass). But while their DNC campaign was a resounding "success" that exceeded its goals by several hundred percent, GCI's MoveOn campaign matched this in resounding failure. As I wrote:

Things went wrong, as things always will in a campaign. Then things got worse, as things often will in a campaign. But what happened next was a breakdown that went beyond miscommunication, disorganization, and Acts of the Campaign God....

Altogether, Leave No Voter Behind collapsed under what I described to be "a profound crisis of leadership." Since MoveOn has seen fit to rehire this vendor for its 2006 operation and beyond, I argued that it is important to open up a dialogue about what this crisis was all about.

Predictably, the dialogue so far has been contentious. On the whole, my account was confirmed by the 'field organizers' who were working right on the ground. But several 'lead organizers' (managers who oversaw the individual MoveOn offices) claimed thatconsidering the circumstances -- in which GCI was a brand new company attempting something that neither organization had ever done before -- everything went fine. (This discrepency in perspective between management and field organizers is quite revealing in its own way -- and it's one that recurred throughout the campaign; I'll explore it later in the series.)

At one point in the discussion, Matt Stoller pointedly asked, "What is failure? What is success?" My fellow field organizers in the comments actually did a good job of answering that, but I want this discussion to be as clear as possible on the matter. So in this post, I'll explain exactly what the campaign set out to do, and I'll sort out the two reasons that it fell off track right from the outset. In other words, this post is only about the "Things went wrong...[t]hen things got worse" part. These initial failures ultimately precipitated the "crisis of leadership" that I believe is still present (though passive) within Grassroots Campaigns' model.

There's more...