I received a nice Letter From MoveOn.Org (re: war bill)

[BayCityProgressive]

I had politely e-mailed MoveOn and expressed my dismay that in their most recent poll they did not include the Lee bill as an option. They contacted me and explained their position. I like that MoveOn is in touch with members like this. I just wanted to share with other DUers.

I wanted to respond quickly to your concerns about the Iraq supplemental vote and our poll, because there's some misinformation floating out there about our position and how we came to it.



First, some folks are saying that MoveOn doesn't support the so-called Lee Amendment -- a stronger proposal than the Pelosi bill that would end the war by 2007. It's a no-brainer that MoveOn members would support that proposal, and that's what we've told the press. We actually encouraged MoveOn members to mention it in their calls to Congress this past week.



But the Lee Amendment and the Pelosi bill aren't mutually exclusive, and in fact, Barbara Lee didn't put her amendment up for a vote. So we wanted to know how our members felt on the final bill, given that it was unlikely to include the (admittedly better) Lee amendment.



Other people are saying that MoveOn members didn't know what they voted for. Over 126,000 of us voted -- a usual response rate for a vote like this (by comparison, the percentage of Connecticut members who voted for us to endorse Ned Lamont was about the same). And reading through those comments, it's clear that most people understood the choice in front of us. I've attached some of them below.



(We also did a few polls before this one to feel folks out, and got the same response no matter how we asked the question.)



Finally, some folks simply don't think that voting for a timetable is enough to end the war. Neither do I, actually -- this bill doesn't go as far as I'd like, and we need to keep pushing. But the choice in front of us, unfortunately, was between a bill with no timetable and a bill that, for the first time, sets an end date for the war. I think that's a start.



There's no question that this was a difficult call -- and we have allies who came down against the bill. We'll continue to work together with them to bring an end to the war. We'll all need to push together to make this happen. We will work together as a community to move forward on the goals we have in common and focus on proposals for which there’s broad support – as there was in this case.



It always pains me to hear when a MoveOn member is unhappy with us, and I take this feedback very seriously. I hope this helps clarify what our position is, and how our process worked. We'll try to make these decisions even more clear in the weeks to come.



And I hope you'll stay involved. Bottom line, MoveOn's a group of people trying to make change -- the more of us, the more change we can make.



Sincerely,



-- Eli Pariser

Executive Director, MoveOn.org Political Action





P.S. If you're curious about more of the details of the poll, we've written up a detailed response to the allegations that are swirling around at:

http://pol.moveon.org/iraq/supplemental.html

[Breeze54]

1. Thanks for sharing this

and the link! I've been looking for 'the results' for a couple of days now.
Much appreciated!

[EFerrari]

2. So, why did they conduct their poll when we were all out demonstrating?

And this is the first I hear that Eli is concerned about member discontent in all these years. Maybe they've learned something. That would be cool.

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. I got the same letter

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x490512#491030