Can you summarize the point of this article? It will not allow me to register.
Essentially, the Dems and the GOP used fundementally different philosopohical approaches both to "get out the vote" and finding new voters in Ohio, and it contrasts the successes and failures on both sides.
The article is a little short on GOP "nuts and bolts" but is a good overview of what ACT, MOveOn, etc did correctly in Ohio in terms of new voter mobilzation and registration on the Dem side.
One of the worst days of Steve Bouchard's 36 years on the planet began, as it would end, in a bleak, second-floor banquet room on Main Street in Columbus. Someone must have thought the exposed brick walls and copper piping would give the room a contemporary feel, but the effect was undone by a sad little mirror ball overhanging a miniature dance floor. ''This is what I'm talking about,'' Bouchard said, sipping from a takeout coffee cup and gesturing at the lights. ''Doesn't this just bring you back to your Studio 54 days?'' It was Election Day in Ohio, and a jumbo flat-screen TV had already been wheeled into place for the Democrats who would gather here, some 15 hours later, to watch the presidential returns come in.
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There was always something torturous about Election Day, Bouchard said. After all the months of working more or less around the clock, suddenly it was a struggle to stay busy. Bouchard was the Ohio state director for America Coming Together, the most important and perhaps most controversial group to emerge from the new galaxy of independently financed organizations commonly known as 527's. As such, he presided over the most critical state operation in the largest get-out-the-vote effort ever undertaken to win a single presidential campaign. But once the voting commenced, his work was pretty much finished. ''By the time the clock hits 4 o'clock, what can I do?'' he asked. ''I know guys who will go get a big Delmonico steak on Election Day. I know a guy who actually goes into his office with a movie and a bottle of wine and closes down. Once the plan's been written and you have your field and regional people out there working, you're pretty much done. All I can do is go around and see how things are going.''
But still, he had risen in the dark -- who could sleep? -- and made his way downtown. Around the perimeter of the room, giddy volunteers lined up in pairs behind signs that read Team 1, Team 2 and so on, all the way up to Team 20. Each duo was handed a folder that contained MapQuest directions and a detailed map of a neighborhood with the team's specific street route outlined in Magic Marker, along with an armful of door-hangers reminding people to vote. The same scene was playing itself out in 64 other staging areas around the state. This was the first of three waves of canvassers who would hit the streets before the polls closed at 7:30 p.m.; all told, ACT and its sister organizations in a giant umbrella coalition of liberal groups known as America Votes would put hundreds of paid canvassers and some 20,000 volunteers on Ohio's streets before the day was out.
A year ago it had seemed to Bouchard that it would be impossible to get ordinary people to volunteer for a 527. (The name comes from the provision of the tax code that makes such groups legal.) After all, ACT represented a phenomenon that had never been seen in presidential politics: a campaign without a candidate. Much of its staggering $130 million haul came from wealthy liberals like George Soros and interest groups like the Service Employees International Union, which was ACT's single largest contributor of money and manpower. (The union kicked in more than $26million.) But legal restrictions in the 2002 campaign-finance law created a wall between ACT and both the Democratic Party and the Kerry campaign itself, so that ACT officials were barely allowed to speak to their longtime friends at the campaign. ACT existed separately as an enormous door-to-door campaign without anything like the star quality of an actual, breathing politician.
But ACT had nonetheless evolved into something glamorous, a kind of sleek new political vehicle for the Volvo-driving set. Perhaps because they supported other liberal groups aligned with ACT, like Emily's List or the Sierra Club, or perhaps because ACT had a certain outsider cachet, thousands of volunteers from New York, New England and California chose to work for the organization in Ohio instead of the Kerry campaign; among them, I met a book editor from Manhattan and a massage therapist from Santa Barbara. A few nights earlier, in Cleveland, Bouchard and I visited a basement-level phone bank where the ACT volunteers included the actors Matt Dillon and Timothy Hutton and the actress Eliza Dushku. (''Eliza who?'' I asked. ''Don't know,'' Bouchard shrugged, prompting the actress herself, apparently blessed with good hearing, to turn around and appraise us coldly.) Now, on election morning, he surveyed the ballroom. ''I don't care where these people are from,'' he said, ''as long as they're motivated.''
