Senate Trial Fertile Area for Grass-Roots Group

Last week’s Senate vote to extend the Clinton impeachment trial was a setback for Moveon.org, the grass-roots Internet campaign that aims to bring a quick end to the impeachment proceedings. But in the first 24 hours after the Senate vote, more than 3,000 people went to https://www.moveon.org and took the 3-month-old group’s pledge to “work to elect candidates who courageously address key national issues and who reject the politics of division and personal destruction,” the San Francisco-based organization said.

Altogether, those citizens promised to devote 279,265 volunteer hours to help like-minded candidates in the 2000 election, according to Moveon.org. That is in addition to more than $13 million in campaign pledges the group has already collected. Pledges have come from each of the 50 states, the group said.

“Citizens want to act but aren’t quite sure how,” said Wes Boyd, who co-founded both Berkeley Systems and Moveon.org with Joan Blade. “With the power of the Internet, we will make it easy for volunteers to connect with campaigns in their area. Some of them may even do their volunteer work by modem.”