Monday saw the launch of Open Left, the new site by former MyDD mainstays Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers. The third partner in the project is Mike Lux, co-founder and CEO of consulting firm Progressive Strategies, a political consulting firm focused on strategic consulting for non-profits, PACs, and progressive donors.
Lux leaped to political fame in the mid-1980s as Executive Director of the Iowa Citizen Action Network (ICAN). Lux doubled the organization's annual budget from $500,000 in 1984 to almost $1 million in 1987 while raising the organization's membership from 30,000 to 75,000. After that stint, he moved on to the campaign trail, serving as senior staff in the `88 cycle first for the Joe Biden campaign and the for Paul Simon.
Lux went on to serve as Executive Vice President, PAC director and chief lobbyist for the Iowa AFL-CIO, then was was Constituency Director on both the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign and the presidential transition. In the Clinton Administration, he served as public liaison on the health care issue.
In a mission statement, Stoller likens Open Left to the open-source software movement and takes issue with the distinction between 'netroots' and more traditional organizing:
There is no divide between online and offline at this point; insiders use email and blogs, and outsider activists run campaigns and have in-person conferences. The term 'Open Left' is a much wider and more descriptive way of understanding the larger political dynamics at play. It is not the use of the internet that matters, it is the expression of traditional left-wing American principles on open systems that is the institutional innovation at work here.
The site seems to be starting out on the same turf as MyDD and Daily Kos, with a national focus supplemented by more local user diaries.
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