Liberal Talk Radio

Chris Sullentrop gets MoveOn.org just about right:

There are worse things to do in life than make people feel good, but most political organizations—especially ones that spend more than $30 million during an election and get called a left-wing Christian Coalition—have more concrete goals. MoveOn, however, isn’t an organization so much as an outlet. It’s a network of aggrieved liberals, connected by the central nervous system of the Internet, and it enables its members to convince themselves they’re “doing something” when they’re really not.

What’s so right-on about this is that it gets to the fundamentally different way in which liberals and conservatives organize. Here in Seattle, we’re more or less in MoveOn.org ground zero. We may not have the highest percentage of members, per capita, but we’re there in spirit. And from what I can tell first-hand, liberals like to bitch and moan (by starting political blogs and/or talk radio shows, for example), but it’s not always clear that they know where to direct it, or whether they even want to direct it if they could.

That said, Sullentrop doesn’t quite see the forest for the trees. Yes, it’s true, like he says, most of the candidates MoveOn endorsed didn’t win. But that’s because they went out of their way to support candidates who had immensely uphill battles. Like a venture capitalist, they thew some weight to some real underdogs hoping one or two winners might emerge to re-coup the investment.

Someday, MoveOn will take it to the next level, and really be a force of change and not just hysteria. I, for one, can’t even read most of the emails they send me these days. But there’s a nugget of an awesome idea in there…

I guess I just need to wait for them to fix all the bugs in MoveOn.org 2.0.