Power Ballots

Photograph by Ben Alsop

The tour generated a mountain of publicity, raised more than $10 million for voter turnout efforts, and increased MoveOn's membership significantly. What it didn't do, however, was unseat President Bush.

"In the middle of it, we really felt like we were actually going to be able to do something," says Nick Harmer, bassist for Death Cab for Cutie, who played several Vote for Change concerts. "You go into an arena where Pearl Jam has packed in 50,000 screaming fans and think, 'This is great. These people are here, and they're going to be mobilized.' I think we all had a pretty inflated sense of what was possible. So there was a bit of a shell shock after the election when the results came in."

Jonathan Wilcox, a Republican strategist and adjunct professor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, says the tour's negative tone led to what he judged as its failures. "When a celebrity endorses a product, they don't tell you how bad the other products are," he says. "When Bruce Springsteen gets up there and says, 'George Bush is a war criminal,' that's only going to appeal to people who think Bush is a war criminal. Having one of the most distinguished, popular musicians of our time reinforce a fairly extreme view isn't the classic way to sell it."

But MoveOn director Eli Pariser cautions against drawing many sweeping conclusions based on the outcome of the 2004 race. "People have a tendency to overlearn," he says. "We lost that election ultimately by about 55,000 votes in Ohio. If a stadium full of people had voted a different way, we'd have a different president and we'd be looking back on the tour as, 'Wow, that was such a masterstroke that put it over the top.' These kinds of tours aren't about getting a particular voter to change their mind; they're about signaling culturally which way the wind is blowing. I think the wind was in fact blowing against the Bush policies. That became clear as soon as the election was over and his approval ratings plummeted. It just didn't happen quite early enough."

MoveOn hasn't yet committed to any similar events for this year, and there is some question whether musicians -- many of whom were fueled by anti-Bush fervor in 2004 -- will bring the same sort of energy to the 2008 general election campaigns, now that Bush won't be on the ballot. The conventional wisdom is that the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain arouses far less animosity among the creative class than the current president does. But Lara Bergthold, who served as national political director of Wesley Clark's 2004 presidential campaign, then later as deputy political director and liaison to the entertainment community for John Kerry's campaign, expects musicians to be at least as active in 2008 as they were four years earlier.

"Even though it's not about replacing Bush, it's about finding somebody who can roll back a lot of what he has done," she says. "And there is an antiwar fever in the country. Certainly among more progressive musical artists that will be a big push to become involved."