This is a new series that will focus on resolutions to the "crisis of leadership" that failed MoveOn PAC's 2004 Leave No Voter Behind campaign, and continues to fail its 2006 Operation Democracy campaign. As explored in the post-mortem "Grassroots Campaigns Inc's Great War of 2004," the crisis is located in MoveOn's subcontractor, GCI, which uses a campaign model based on the Fund/Public Interest Research Groups. This model is unaccountable to its participants and unresponsive to conditions on the ground; consequentially, its grassroots energies are burned through and, at the same time, it fails in its own objectives of political action. It bears repeating that we don't need to reinvent the wheel in order to run better campaigns -- the fixes to the model can be significant without being structurally radical. This post will propose one such change. To do so, I want to take another quick jump back into 2004 (after this, I promise to put the nasty business behind).

During the national training for Leave No Voter Behind, we heard many allusions to the spectacular Dean campaign of a year before. Grassroots Campaigns Inc's MoveOn Field Organizers (FOs) were supposedly carrying on in the spirit of that web phenomenon, as we would be using the 'cutting-edge web technology' of the MoveOn PAC WAC (Web Action Center) to create our massive grassroots army.

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So we've been talking about MoveOn PAC's 2004 GOTV campaign, Leave No Voter Behind. About how the company that MoveOn subcontracted, Grassroots Campaigns, Inc (GCI), was significantly delayed in getting its campaign off the ground, and about how its `cutting edge' internet-based computer system (the Web Action Center) collapsed barely a week in. About how, in order to make up for these setbacks, GCI forced its organizers to redouble their recruitment, at the expense of training their volunteers--which effectively `broke' its own campaign model, but succeeded in getting GCI re-hired by MoveOn for 2006. All along, I've been saying that this conversation is building to a constructive point - but before that can happen, it's important that I fully illustrate the rather bold claim made in the first post: that the result was, for many involved, `a soul-crushing experience.'

I want to make sure that when you read that 'half of the organizer staff didn't make it to Election Day,' you see more than a number. But so far, this analysis has been mostly macro -- largely because I didn't want our discussion to get bogged down in tedium and quibble. After all, campaigns are `hard work,' inevitably there are going to be some feelings hurt along the way, and as Zack Exley pointed out in the comments:

the problems you're describing are systemic to all politics...and really to the question of organization in general.

Indeed - but if we can identify a pattern to the problems, then we can think about a solution. So let's get micro. Here are four stories that are representative of the dozens of people I've interviewed - they are mostly about the relationships between the Field Organizers (FOs), who worked directly with the volunteers, and their supervising Lead Organizers (LOs). I've changed some details to keep things anonymous, but there is no invention here.

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In the first post of this series, I described my experience working as a field organizer for MoveOn PAC in the 2004 election:  

The 2004 MoveOn PAC Leave No Voter Behind was not just a 'bad' experience. It was a soul-crushing experience.

I did not choose that phrase carelessly -- it is a sentiment shared by many of my fellow organizers who were out there on the ground. In the comments, they've called the campaign "ill-conceived,""cynical," and "disastrous." Since MoveOn has rehired the vendor that ran Leave No Voter Behind--Grassroots Campaigns, Inc--to run its 2006 ground operation, Operation Democracy, I believe it's important to open up a dialogue about what went wrong.

A number of GCI's managers from the campaign have taken issue with these posts -- they reason that all campaigns are "hard work," and that "kinks" and "snags" should be expected, especially since this particular campaign was the first time that either MoveOn or GCI had attempted such an operation.

But this glosses over some crucial context. GCI is in fact the youngest offspring of the Public Interest Research Groups family; Leave No Voter Behind was staffed by hundreds of PIRG/Fund for Public Interest Research managers, who took leaves of absence to work on the campaign. The PIRGs do, in fact, have experience in GOTV--on college campuses and state ballot initiatives--and though nothing on this scale had ever been implemented, in an important way this campaign was not so different from a standard PIRG/Fund operation. It was a new permutation of their well-worn model.

As I wrote in the "Strip-Mining the Grassroots" series (and it would help to read that post in conjunction with this one), the PIRG/Fund world is rigidly structured around this model:

The model is more than a set of guidelines -- it's a comprehensive campaign template that assigns the goals, schedules the time, scripts the interactions, and measures the progress of each participant. Those goals are defined entirely in terms of numbers -- numbers of recruits, numbers of members, numbers of dollars raised. It has three primary components -- recruitment, training, and canvassing -- which are compartmentalized and monitored in order to produce the optimal result.

In this post, I will explain -- in terms of this model itself -- why the Leave No Voter Behind campaign collapsed under a crisis of leadership that can be traced directly to the top of GCI.

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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.

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