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....Once it took years of heavy spending on direct mail and other recruitment methods to build a national membership organization; MoveOn.org, the online liberal advocacy group, acquired half a million names — with virtually no investment — just months after posting an Internet petition opposing President Clinton's impeachment in 1998.
MoveOn, and groups like it on the left and right, chisel at the power of the major political parties by providing an alternative source of campaign funds and volunteers. But otherwise, the two parties that have defined American political life since the 1850s have been largely immune from the centrifugal current of the Internet era.
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Trippi believes an independent presidential candidate who struck a chord could organize support through the Internet just as inexpensively. "Somebody could come along and raise $200 million and have 600,000 people on the streets working for them without any party structure in the blink of an eye," he says.
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More and more Democrats see their future in Bush's model, not Clinton's. Trippi says Clinton's conviction that elections are won mostly by converting swing voters "is obsolete." Democrats, Trippi argues, are more likely to win back the White House by increasing turnout among their own supporters with a pointedly partisan message, as Bush did.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-outlook25apr25,1,2994339.column?coll=la-news-politics-national&ctrack=2&cset=true