The effort to win congressional approval of the Iran nuclear agreement has brought a new intensity to peace advocates that hasn’t been seen since the Iraq War, including MoveOn.org, a group that helped President Obama win the White House but has seen its power wane in the last few years.
“We’ve been campaigning in support of diplomacy with Iran and against another war in the Middle East for years,” said Nick Berning, a spokesman for MoveOn.org.
When the 60-day clock for congressional review of the deal between six world powers and Tehran started ticking just ahead of lawmakers’ annual August recess, MoveOn.org launched a targeted campaign to deploy staff and grassroots activists to key states and districts to show up at town halls and demonstrate to their Democratic members of Congress that they support implementing the agreement.
Almost as quickly, they also showed that there would be a steep price for Democrats who oppose the deal, and launched a donor boycott of lawmakers who don’t fall into line.
Nearly 25,000 donors have heeded the call MoveOn issued Aug. 7 to punish New York Sen. Chuck Schumer for bucking President Obama on the deal, representing more than $11 million in would-be campaign donations so far, Berning said.
“While not unexpected, it is outrageous and unacceptable that the Democrat who wants to be the party’s leader in the Senate is siding with the Republican partisans and neoconservative ideologues who are trying to scrap this agreement and put us on the path to war,” said Ilya Sheyman, head of the organization’s political arm.
The boycott also applies to campaign committees that back noncompliant Democrats, starting with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Berning said. The DSCC’s mission is to re-elect incumbents such as Schumer and New Jersey’s Bob Menendez, who on Tuesday said he also can’t support the nuclear pact.
Obama rekindled many of his original supporters’ anti-war passion when he told grassroots activists: “I want everyone on the phone to get moving — do not wait,” during a conference call July 30. In an Aug. 5 speech at American University, he said that critics of the plan are following the same logic that got the U.S. into war in Iraq in 2003.
Back then, “we had to end the mindset that got us to war in the first place … a preference for military action over diplomacy,” Obama said about the run-up to the Iraq War.
“The administration has done good job of saying people who supported the Iraq War are the same people opposed to the Iran deal, who are using the same justifications and motivations that they did to support Iraq War,” said one Democratic strategist who worked on the failed 2004 presidential campaign of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a major beneficiary of MoveOn.org’s early activism.
Berning said that MoveOn’s “60 days to stop a war” campaign has encouraged original members to re-engage.
There is “no question that a lot of MoveOn members joined the organization during our campaign to bring the Iraq War to an end,” and the Iran deal is “one of the issues that MoveOn members have been most responsive to” recently, he said.
Berning said that Schumer’s opposition took grassroots activists aback.
“MoveOn really helped change the political calculus in Washington” regarding the Iraq War, he said. The outcome was a Democratic Caucus that “more closely reflected the views of Democrats” overall. “We elected a president who opposed the war in Iraq” so having a majority of Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill who “support diplomacy and not a war of choice is a huge win.”
Unlike where the party and country was in 2002 and 2003, most people believe that “war should be a last resort,” Berning added.
MoveOn, which boasts more than 8 million followers nationally, just sent an email to its 165,000 members in New Jersey telling them that Menendez is “choosing war over diplomacy” and encouraging them to voice their support for the Iran deal.
The organization just hired nine staffers for the pro-deal campaign to work in key states. It also is planning a “national day of action” on Aug. 26 for which it will organize events, petition deliveries and rallies outside undecided Democrats’ district offices to show how much the grassroots support the nuclear deal, Berning said.
It has gathered more than 1,500 signatures to encourage the Democratic National Committee to oust Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, who has yet to say which side she comes down on in the deal debate, as its leader and replace her with Dean, a former chairman.
“We thought we won this debate already,” Berning said. “We thought Democrats already understood that war should be a last resort.”
