Let me tell you a story about MoveOn.org.

It was founded in 1998, during the height of the Lewinsky scandal, when a husband-and-wife team of software developers, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, were having lunch in a Chinese restaurant not far from their home in Berkeley, Calif.

During the lunch, Boyd and Blades were talking about how crazy Republicans in Washington were to be pursuing the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

The people at one table talked to the people at another table, and pretty soon it seemed like everyone in the restaurant agreed: The whole impeachment thing was just insane.

After lunch, Boyd and Blades, who had recently sold their software company for many millions of dollars, went home and came up with a petition calling on Congress to censure the president and move on to more pressing issues.

They sent it to a small group of friends. And then those friends sent it to their friends, and so on, until the petition had been signed by hundreds of thousands of people.

On the basis of that consensus in a Chinese restaurant in one of the bluest enclaves in all of America, followed by sympathetic responses on like-minded mailing lists, Boyd and Blades concluded that they had uncovered the will of the true American majority.

And guess what? It agreed with them.

Ever since, MoveOn has viewed itself as America’s voice.

Sometimes it has been. After all, most Americans did not want Bill Clinton removed from office.

But at other times, MoveOn has been wildly out of touch with the American public.

To see that, you need look no further than Sept. 11, 2001.

Just hours after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, MoveOn circulated a petition urging George W. Bush not to go to war in Afghanistan.

“Our leaders are under tremendous pressure to act in the aftermath of the terrible events of September 11th,” the petition said. “We the undersigned support justice, not escalating violence, which would only play into the terrorists’ hands.”

At that moment, nearly every American supported military retaliation against Afghanistan, home base of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. But MoveOn was urging that we step back, avoid fighting, and find some alternative way to pursue “justice.”
Not exactly the voice of the true American majority.

Now MoveOn is on the front lines of the fight against the war in Iraq. And while it is true that many Americans believe the war was a mistake and support bringing the troops home, MoveOn has still managed to go too far — so far that it hurts its own cause.

Its latest blunder is a full-page ad in The New York Times suggesting — screaming, actually — that Gen. David Petraeus would lie to Congress to keep the surge going in Iraq.

MoveOn chose a headline no one would forget: “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?”

Is that the voice of the true American majority?

Not exactly. Even though many Americans have their doubts about the war, or think it’s time to end it, most of them still trust military leaders like Petraeus to do what they think is best.

But perhaps that’s not the best question. Perhaps the best question is whether MoveOn is the voice of a majority of Democrats in Congress.

Certainly many Democrats moved quickly to denounce the “General Betray Us” ad.

But did they secretly approve?

Of course, no prominent Democrat would be so reckless as to come out and call Petraeus a liar.

But we do know that a number of them regularly strategize with MoveOn’s leadership. Were they happy that MoveOn said out loud — in the pages of the Times, no less — what they couldn’t say themselves?

Ask them. What is certain is that MoveOn has moved the war debate to another level. In the past, MoveOn has properly focused its criticism on the civilian leadership of the war: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.

But now MoveOn is turning its rhetorical guns toward Petraeus and the other military commanders who believe the surge has made enough progress to merit further effort.

For years now, it’s been a commonplace occurrence on the left for anti-war leaders to say they support the troops.
Now, that’s not entirely true. And if the “General Betray Us” episode is any guide, we’ll be seeing progressively more outrageous tactics from MoveOn in the months to come.

York is a White House correspondent for
National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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