Salon: The revolution that failed -- for now

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Groups like ACT and MoveOn promised to remake American politics, but they didn't beat Bush. Is there a future for liberal People Power?

By Farhad Manjoo

Three days after the election, I called Ellen Malcolm, founder of the influential advocacy group Emily's List and president of America Coming Together, to ask her where she'd screwed up.

The question wasn't as provocative as it sounds: 2004 was supposed to have been the year of the activist. For months, progressives had been extolling the possibilities of groups like ACT, which -- by bringing together Hollywood money, Silicon Valley tech wizardry, Washington know-how, and the passion of an army of volunteers recruited from Berkeley to Burlington -- seemed to be forging a new and quite powerful force in American politics, a movement that liberals promised would not only win this election but might also rewrite the rules of the game. ACT and its sister groups were to have been the Democrats' silver bullet, the one trick -- people power! -- Karl Rove could not match.

But as the returns streamed in on Nov. 2, the promise of ACT and the other third-party liberal groups fizzled. ACT had invested heavily in mobilizing voters in Florida and Ohio, and John Kerry lost in both places. What happened? I asked Malcolm. Why had ACT failed?

Malcolm didn't want to talk about failure. "We were very successful," she said. "But we didn't win the election. We turned out many, many, many voters, including a lot of first-time voters. It was a tremendously successful effort for democracy. But we're all obviously very disappointed in the results."

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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/12/15/527/