I was not at all surprised to learn that Change.org is done pretending to be progressive (I also wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up being bad for business). One thing’s always been clear to me: they’re in it for the money, not the politics. That’s why they got involved in progressive petition gathering in the first place. Because petition gathering in politics is pretty much a racket anyway.

Elected officials don’t care about petitions. They don’t care about mass form emails. They care about hand written letters and phone calls, and they care about office visits more (though I’m overstating the case on those methods, too. They really care about money). Progressive organizations know this.

When I worked in ...