Anti-war Agitator

By Sam Pfeifle, December 4, 2002

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An interview with 21-year-old Eli Pariser, who has rallied hundreds of thousands in protesting US military action in Iraq, speaking about politics, the anti-war movement and youth activism.

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Stories about the power of the Internet have long since become cliché. It’s impossible, however, to write of 21-year-old Eli Pariser’s accomplishments without using that tired phrase. He has, quite literally, harnessed the power of the Internet, to the tune of more than 700,000 online signatures on a petition he originally posted at www.9-11peace.org and now can be seen at http://peace.moveon.org. Written just after the September 11 attacks, the petition implores the US government and world leaders “to use moderation and restraint in responding to the [September 11] terrorist attacks against the United States,” and “to use, wherever possible, international judicial institutions and international human rights law to bring to justice those responsible for the attacks, rather than the instruments of war, violence, or destruction.”

Rather than just a list of names, Pariser and the people with whom he joined forces at MoveOn.org -- an online progressive campaign originally designed to move the country beyond the Monica Lewinsky scandal -- encouraged people to write notes of explanation. And these 700,000 testimonials made one seriously impressive stack of papers when delivered to world leaders like British Prime Minister Tony Blair, NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson, and US President George W. Bush.

From there, as US sights shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pariser -- who became MoveOn.org’s international campaigns coordinator -- and his colleagues targeted their efforts on the vote for the authorization of force against Iraq. After setting up meetings with every senator in the United States prior to the vote, and orchestrating thousands of emails and phone calls, MoveOn was widely credited with influencing enough representatives and senators to make the vote interesting.

They continued this effort right up through the election, actively campaigning and raising more than a million dollars in small contributions for candidates who stood up to say they would not support unilateral attack on Iraq. One of them was Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a tragic plane crash. The others were House Representatives Rush Holt, Jay Inslee, and Rick Larsen. They all won their races.

Pretty impressive stuff from a guy, in Eli Pariser, who’s 21 years old and grew up in Camden. When this interview took place he had just stepped out of an anti-war organizing meeting with representatives from the National Organization of Women, the NAACP, and the AFL-CIO.

Reporter:So I take it things haven’t slowed down since the election.

Eli Pariser: Well, we’re definitely in a period of reflection: What are the next steps? How do we move things forward from here? But, certainly, there are sort of big plans afoot and I think the early part of December is going to be very exciting across the country, there are going to be lots and lots of things going on, especially on a religious front, which is pretty cool as well.

Q:So, I know that you came into MoveOn through 911-peace.org. Is it still all about the anti-war movement for you or have you found yourself getting involved in more political issues?

A:Well I’ve always been involved in a whole bunch of things. I guess I got my start as an activist in Camden as an environmental movement guy, and in college I worked on some anti-corporate stuff, and I worked on socially responsible investing, and I’ve been doing all sorts of things for a while. You know, 911-peace was not by any means the product of a long history with the peace movement. It was more of an instinctual response based on where I thought things looked like they were going. You know, doing foreign policy peace work -- it came to me, I didn’t go to it exactly. But, over the last year I’ve certainly come to really be excited about it and, for me as an organizer, that’s certainly where my center is right now.

Q:I kept abreast of a lot of the fundraising campaigns you were behind in supporting anti-war candidates. I know you were heavily behind Chellie Pingree’s campaign. What sort of impact do you feel like you had on the most recent election, and is there anything now, looking back, where you might have liked to have targeted your efforts differently?

A:I don’t really have a whole lot of regrets [he kind of laughs]. Right after the Iraq [use of force] vote, we did an outreach that was sort of a “reward the heroes” campaign, and it was directed toward four people who had really taken a stand. They were in tight races, and they did the right thing: Paul Wellstone and three representatives. You know, the three representatives won and Paul would have. So, in that respect, I feel really good about that initiative.

I think one of the most significant things about the election is that no one lost on their vote against the Iraq resolution. Not a single person. In fact, the poster boy for being tarred as anti-patriotic was [Georgia Senate Democrat] Max Cleeland, who voted for the resolution. So, I think one of the messages that the elections definitely gave was that when the Democrats split and ran scared on that vote, they were only hurting themselves by doing that. They weren’t picking up an electoral advantage.

So, coming out of the elections, one of the things that I’m excited about is the fact that the Democrats have had their wake-up call. They know that they can’t accommodate any more, and there are real signs that, as a party, they’re beginning to actually take a stand, get a backbone, you know, fight back. And I’m very excited about that.

Q:Do you think Nancy Pelosi’s becoming the House Minority Leader is part of that correct direction, that direction you’d like to see the Democratic Party going in?

A:Absolutely. She was one of the lead organizers of the vote in the House against the resolution, and she really did an incredible job of getting a majority of Democrats to vote against their congressional leader [Dick Gephardt]. The thing that’s exciting to me about Nancy is that it’s not just Iraq, she actually is a leader with a vision and with all sorts of principles and concerns that she’ll be working on. I think we’ve not seen enough of that in the Democratic Party recently.

Q:What about Tom Daschle’s announcement that he’s going to stay on as Senate Majority -- well, now, Minority Leader? Do you feel that’s a maintaining of the status quo or do you think he can work with people like Pelosi to keep going forward?

A:I believe that Tom Daschle can be a good leader for folks concerned about Iraq and a whole bunch of other issues. I think what happened that was really critically wounding in the run up to the Iraq vote was that, apparently without consultation with Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt went ahead and said, “Yeah we agree to this resolution.” That left Daschle as the only leader in Congress who was not giving the resolution the thumbs up, and, ultimately, that’s a very difficult position to be in. Do I wish that he had stuck it out anyway? Yes. But I believe that, working with Pelosi, he has the vision and he has the leadership to get some good stuff done.

Q:You guys have focused a lot of attention on trying to reform the Democratic party. What about the Green Party as an alternative to the Democratic party. Do you think it’s a viable option for people?

A:We certainly have a lot of members of the Green Party on our list, and we welcome that. I believe that on a national level, the way the system is currently structured, the Greens end up being the spoiler. I think, basically, the Greens and the Democrats need to work together. They need to figure out how they can pull together around what I think are primarily common values. I believe the base values of the core constituencies of both parties are more or less the same. And the question is, “How do we work together to forward our progressive agenda for our country?” Rather than squabbling over slight differences in platform.

Q:Coming back to Maine. We watched polling numbers for Collins and Pingree from the very outset of the race. People voting for Collins never really dipped below 60 percent at any time during the race. Why wasn’t Chellie Pingree able to chip away at Collins voters at all?

A:Susan Collins plays a very good game of triangulation, moving to the center when it’s convenient. It was a very difficult campaign in that respect. Also, Chellie didn’t have the name recognition, the credibility from the get-go, that Susan Collins did. I was talking to [Pingree] two years ago about this, and then, and ever since then, she said this would be a very difficult campaign. But what I think is very exciting is that a lot of people did get out there on the streets, they did work on that campaign, and they did engage in that campaign, and I do believe that momentum won’t be lost going forward and in other campaigns in Maine, hopefully, if she runs again.

Q:It’s been perplexing for me that we’ve had Allen and Baldacci, and now Allen and Michaud, Democrats, as our Congressmen, and Snowe and Collins, Republicans, as our senators. How do you explain to yourself that Maine can go the Democratic route with the congressmen every two years, but then stay Republican with the senators?

A:I don’t watch Maine politics close enough on that level to have a really great answer for you. But we all know that Maine voters are notoriously independent, and for a lot of people it really isn’t about the party, it’s about the candidate.

Snowe and Collins have both played their cards well and accommodating enough so that the argument about why they should go just isn’t very strong once they’re in there. And that’s really what the Democrats are going to have to work on in Maine: making the case that, ultimately, no matter how these folks vote, their first vote is going to be for Trent Lott. And that agenda runs entirely counter to what I feel a lot of Mainers think they’re voting for when they vote for these people. If that’s the case, what really needs to come across is that the party really does matter, and I don’t think Mainers want to mess with a party that’s all about corporate tax giveaways to the very rich, and global militancy.

Q:Now, you’ve had a chance to witness the anti-war movement on a national scale. I’m seeing it mostly here on the Maine scale. How does the 2500 people who showed up in Augusta to protest the war, or the 300 people who have gathered twice in Portland to protest the war, go along with other states around the country? Is Maine a very anti-war state, or is it similar here to other places around the country?

I think that demonstration in Augusta, in particular, was outstanding because every time I looked at press coverage of that day they mentioned the demonstration in Maine. And I think, yeah, there’s a lot going on in Maine and there are a lot of people in Maine who are doing some serious organizing.