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.

There's more...