Whither the ward heelers? The democratic "527s" all but supplanted the party, but does ACT have a second act?

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...huge contributions the 527s. But the smart money was wrong: The 527 era has turned out to be one of renewed grass-roots activism and small-donor participation.

Groups like America Coming Together (ACT) ended up inspiring an intense devotion among their activist cadres. Partly that was due to the magnitude of their achievement; by the campaign's conclusion, ACT had raised a stunning $135 million, placed 45,000 paid staffers in the field, worked urban black and other core Democratic communities with a regularity and intensity not seen since the death of the big-city machines, and persuaded millions of battleground state residents to vote for John Kerry.

But for two ACT activists whom I met in the organization's Cleveland headquarters in late October--Carolyn Jackson, a children's book writer who'd journeyed from her Riverside Drive home by Columbia University, and Ed Cyr, a onetime Cambridge, Massachusetts, city councilman--ACT was nothing less than a restoration of grass-roots democracy. Both marveled at the diversity of ACT staffers and volunteers, and at the absence of careerism that each had experienced in past campaigns where staffers sought to curry the candidate's favor. For Jackson and Cyr, ACT had become an alternative to a Democratic Party that had somehow forgotten how to incorporate people into its practice of politics. "You can't get a handle on the Democratic Party," Jackson complained. "It didn't stand for anything. There wasn't anything to do" when she'd called to volunteer.

For Cyr, ACT was a throwback to the days when he'd accompanied his father to the polls on the working-class side of Cambridge--Tip O'Neill's neighborhood, where "we had 85 [percent] to 90 percent turnout; we had the party and the community meshing; and Dad would know half the people" who came in to vote. "Nothing replaced that till ACT came along," Cyr said. "People want to do grass-roots politics; that's what ACT provides." "It's not a party," added Jackson. "It's building a...

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