Behind Bernie Sanders’ Revolution Lies a Meticulously Engineered Grassroots Network

[Purveyor]

The organizers of the current left Democratic insurgency learned from the Dean campaign and borrowed elements from Obama 2008—and Zappos, building an organization that’s the very pinnacle of political organizing. But can it get to the next phase?

Feb 24, 2016 5:00 AM EST

In late 2003, Zack Exley would mount his bicycle in Washington one night each month and lead himself on a tour of the capital’s six gatherings that fellow supporters of Howard Dean had organized on the networking site Meetup. There were more than 800 such gatherings nationwide, many of them in bars and cafés, the first time in American political life that online activism had systematically reproduced itself in the real world. Throughout the fall, the meetups had been symbols of Dean’s success, and were in many ways a forerunner to another Vermont politician who is today challenging the Democratic establishment from the left. But even as Dean’s Internet-catalyzed popularity grew, Exley saw trouble ahead, signs of an inexorable turn towards entropy. “It’s what I call the tyranny of the annoying,” said Exley, now a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders. “The worst people with the most time on their hands take over.”

At the time, Exley knew as much as anyone in the world did about the possibilities and limits of Internet activism. For the past few years, he'd been the de facto leader of the online opposition to George W. Bush. In 1999, he had purchased the domain gwbush.com and built what is often called the first political parody site, complete with doctored pictures showing the Republican front-runner at the time as a cocaine user. (Asked about it at a press conference, Bush called Exley a “garbage man” and mused that “there ought to be limits to freedom.”) As organizing director at MoveOn.org a few years later, Exley helped to direct the group’s response to the Iraq war, driving supporters to sign Web-based petitions it could deliver to Congress. After MoveOn’s member base voted in an online primary to endorse Dean, Exley was detailed to his Burlington headquarters to share expertise and some of MoveOn’s tools with a campaign leadership that had grown fascinated by potential uses of the Internet to cultivate supporters.

Dean was the first candidate to raise large sums of money quickly online, and his staff saw that many of those who donated were also helping to organize local gatherings of supporters on Meetup. But the software lacked a function for local groups to designate a single leader, and the campaign had no official role in the gatherings taking place in its name. “You’d have 10 people who signed in to be the leader, and there’d be arguments,” recalled Exley.

Ultimately, Dean’s “people-powered” movement collapsed just when it needed to be strongest. After his disappointing performances in Iowa and New Hampshire, there was little to show from this innovative exercise in Internet-facilitated fundraising beyond a celebration of the innovation itself. At one point, in a quixotic attempt to bend the the gatherings towards productivity, the campaign had asked attendees to send handwritten notes to New Hampshire voters. “This tiny number of letters were actually written, and no way to track it,” Exley recalled. “The Dean campaign was an agony for me, because I saw this potential.”

Exley found himself reminiscing about those agonies the other day with Becky Bond after a visit to the Nevada headquarters of Sanders’ campaign, for which Bond is also a senior adviser. Exley and Bond first met in 2000 after she called in to an NPR show on which he was appearing. Exley was talking about his project of flashmobs to demand that Florida officials count every vote in the disputed presidential elections; Bond had just launched an online petition demanding that Secretary of State Katherine Harris do the same. For the two 46-year-olds, the history of online activism in the years since was a timeline of missed opportunities, of mass movements that fizzled before any political professionals could figure out how to channel organic energy into tactical gains. Since joining forces last fall, the two friends have been working to engineer a chassis that could hold and support a Sanders movement and direct it on a path to the Democratic nomination. “Because Zack had seen this before, we knew there would be this huge rush, when the media started covering [Sanders] and people discovered he was viable,” Bond said.

more...

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2016-02-24/behind-bernie-sanders-revolution-lies-a-meticulously-engineered-grassroots-network

[Tom Rinaldo]

1. K&R A good long read - will finish it later n/t