Class Of 1995

JUSTIN RUBEN says it's time to MoveOn.

Activist Ruben, who organized graduate teaching assistants at Yale and rural Californians threatened by pesticides, never planned to work within the U.S. electoral system. But that all changed in April 2004 after his brother Adam, political director of MoveOn.org, asked him to join the Internet-based political group's campaign to boost John Kerry's 2004 presidential bid.

While Kerry lost, MoveOn successfully boosted Democratic voter turnout in many precincts. That success emboldened MoveOn, with Ruben as its organizing director, to embark on a two-year project to bring Democrats back to power in Congress.

Friends back then laughed at Ruben's dream. But in November the Democrats won both houses, Ruben says, with the assistance of MoveOn's coast-to-coast phone bank, with 95,000 volunteers placing 7 million calls in contested districts. In Montana, for example, MoveOn members organized by Ruben made 76,000 calls in the final days of a Senate race won by Democrat Jon Tester by about 2,700 votes.

For MoveOn, last year's midterm elections marked a major triumph for an organization founded in 1996 by two software entrepreneurs who circulated an e-mail petition that attracted more than 500,000 signatures in a month and urged Congress during its impeachment battle to censure President Bill Clinton and "move on" to more pressing issues.

Now Ruben is heading up MoveOn's field and Internet campaigns. In March he helped organize thousands of protests and vigils to rally support for congressional resolutions that would set timetables for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. He expects campaigns on health care and climate change later this year and will also set up an online virtual Town Hall with the presidential candidates. "Victories have been few and far between on our side." says Ruben, who lives in Austin, Texas. "We know Democrats aren't going to solve all our problems, but it opens huge numbers of doors for progressives."