Nov. 2 is months past, but twice a week I have Electoral College wet dreams.

Okay, I’m not talking about figments of John Kerry’s glistening body riding a Massachusetts’ surf or of Teresa lathering up in ketchup. There’s nothing sexual about these dreams. They’re just so damn fantastical.

For example, a dream from Nov. 14: I’m in an airport terminal-esque structure. A line of hundreds of people snakes through the terminal hall, all waiting to vote. I scurry through the hall with clipboard in hand and 8×10s of everyone in line. I radio to my staff monitoring the election from different ends of the lines. The election is moving along swimmingly. As the line empties into what appears to be a voting area, I flip through my pictures and match them with the voter. Confronting each person, I am surprised to find that each is a Kerry supporter.

There’s a blurry flash forward to a convention floor, and I’m two feet from the podium, waiting for election results. News spreads on the floor that our candidate has carried Florida. Elation.

Any moment our candidate will appear and I jockey for a better angle. He appears with his running mate. Our new president is Bill Clinton and his running mate, John Edwards. (Even in my dreams, I can’t accept John Kerry as a viable Democratic candidate.) I reach for Clinton and miss, but he catches my eye. He remembers my name and thanks me for the support. My face aches from the stretched smile. Tears. I think that this moment will forever change America and my life, too…

My eyes open. Was it a dream? For a moment, I think it’s true and indulge in the security of a Kerry victory. But the Fallujah death toll from the clock radio brings me back, and I sink into the bed, left with an ache of what could have been.

How did I get like this? I didn’t have this kind of reoccurring night trauma after 9/11, Oklahoma City or the last episode of Frasier.

In the shower, I try to rationalize. “It’s only an election for Christ’s sake! Four years in a country’s 228-year history! I’ve lived through Reagan and Bush Senior.”

After a few weeks of these reoccurring dreams that put Kerry/Clinton in the White House, I came to realize that I’m suffering from a newly diagnosed disease: The MoveOn syndrome.

This syndrome affects MoveOn volunteers who traveled to swing states to get out the vote prior to the election. I was one of these volunteers. The symptoms include not only Electoral College wet dreams but also a loss of appetite for The New York Times editorial page, hot flashes and, in the most severe instances, a deep hatred of Florida Orange Juice and/or Jimmy Buffet.

But unlike Gulf War syndrome, which often bewilders pathologists, how one becomes infected with the MoveOn syndrome is easily explained.

Consider the history: It was Sept. 22, 1998, and President Bill Clinton was revealing to the nation his sexual perversity as he faced impeachment by the United States Congress. In Silicon Valley, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, who just made their fortune on the flying-toaster screen saver (remember that one?), launched a bipartisan Web campaign that lobbied to “[c]ensure the President and move on to pressing issues facing the country.” It collected more than 400,000 signatures in the first several months, breaking all previous internet petition records. Prior to the impeachment, MoveOn held a press conference and pledge drive that brought in $5 million on its first day. Thus, a Web-based activist group was born.

As stated on its Web site, since 1998 MoveOn has grown to over 2 million members and raised millions of dollars as it attempts to bridge the “disconnect between broad public opinion and legislative action.” To do so MoveOn builds “electronic advocacy groups” around such issues as campaign-finance reform, the environment, energy policies, media consolidation and the Iraq war.

After Sept. 11, MoveOn joined forces with Eli Pariser, creator of an online petition calling “for a restrained and multi-lateral response to the attacks,” forming the MoveOn Peace campaign. This alliance reinvigorated MoveOn, and it produced a book, 50 Ways to Love Your Country, a Super Bowl commercial competition and a vital link for politically like-minded individuals from Seattle to Melbourne, Fla.

When the 2004 election arrived, MoveOn, forced by the very McCain/Feingold finance reform it supported, transformed into three separate entities: MoveOn.org, its original advocacy arm, known by the IRS as a 501(c)(4) (the same status shared by the NRA); MoveOn Voter Education Fund, its highly controversial TV advertising and unlimited “soft money” wing—an infamous 527 like its archrival Swift Boats Veterans for Truth; and finally MoveOnPAC, a Political Action Committee dedicated to raising and spending limited “hard money” toward electing John Kerry and defeating George Bush. It was the MoveOnPAC that mobilized me to Florida.

To propel MoveOn beyond the Web and into America’s neighborhoods, MoveOnPAC turned to the former U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) National Field Director Adam Ruben. PIRG, a 1970s brainchild of Ralph Nader, trains young public-interest advocates and employs them throughout the country to run a variety of environmental and social-justice campaigns.

Working with Ruben, MoveOnPAC developed the “Leave No Voter Behind” campaign, focused on getting registered Democrats and independent voters who had not voted in the last election to the polls in 2004. The major swing states were targeted, and, after counties in each state were identified for their Kerry viability, county organizers were hired.

In late September, more than 500 paid MovePAC activists assembled in Milwaukee were trained in voting and PAC laws and then sent off to their respective state and county to open a MoveOnPAC office.

Nick Guroff, my college roommate and a prolific organizer, was appointed as the lead organizer of Brevard County, Fla. Known as the “Space Coast” for its proximity to Cape Canaveral—and the fact that much of its 500,000 plus population is employed by the aeronautical and military industrials giants NASA, Harris and Northrop Grumman—this county on Florida’s mid-Atlantic coast had gone Bush in 2000 by just over 17,000 votes. But organizers believed an aggressive get-out-the-vote campaign could make Brevard go Kerry.

Nick arrived in early October and found himself huddled in a basement with three other members of his staff eating half-cooked Tombstones as Hurricanes Jeanne, Francis and Ivan ripped through the county. He was off to a stellar start.

Home in Los Angeles, I was enjoying the placid waters of the Pacific when I got the call from Nick. He needed help. He gave me two options: Adopt a precinct and make tireless phone calls from Los Angeles to Brevard County voters, or join him in Cortez’s Land of Gold…Florida.

Florida is muggy, sultry, thick with jungle diseases, the perfect place for a syndrome to take hold and seep into your pores. I ,of course, was not aware of this, arriving four days before the election with a vision of myself as a 21st-century Freedom Rider.

The MoveOnPAC office was a tangle of ethernet wires, Mac laptops, huge precinct maps of the coast, fast-food garbage and ringing phones. After a quick introduction to the staff, I was handed a list of Brevard County voters (registered Democrats or independents), was given a script and started calling. During his eight weeks, Nick had mobilized over 500 volunteers in Brevard—at least 150 were from out-of-state and had either traveled to Florida on their own dime or were making calls from out-of-state. The local volunteers—a motley group of retirees, mothers, teenagers, veterans, former Republicans and even Mary Kay lesbians—offered keen insights into local voting habits.

After two hours of calling, I discovered that elderly women loved Kerry, middle-aged men wanted me to go fuck myself for calling and middle-aged women with Southern accents said they were Bush supporters in a tone that sounded as if God had come down, baked a pie and helped them fill out their registration cards.

After each batch of phone calls, volunteers like myself inputted details from the conversations into an online computer database, a system that allowed MoveOnPAC members throughout the country to download or “check out” voter lists and make calls for Brevard County.

The “numbers” kept the organization going. How many Kerry voters did you identify today? Who in the office was in the lead? How many phone calls did you make? This very obsession with tracking the numbers is what had made the PIRGs so successful. Reporting to an office leader several times a day, you felt the need to produce, to show that you were doing your part, so you pushed extra hard to find that Kerry supporter hiding under a rock.

I stayed in a donated house with at least seven other MoveOnPAC volunteers from across country. Instantly, a freshman dorm camaraderie emerged. Snuggled in sleeping bags late at night, we shared stories of our canvassing, phone-call experiences and our lives outside the election. Eccentric Nora, 18 and engaged to a New Zealander, was working on her first campaign and questioning her engagement. Evan, a once-AWOL Florida National Guardsman turned professional activist, had returned to his home state to see it go for Kerry. Jim, a retired principal from North Carolina, drove down in his Prius, convinced North Carolina was Edwards country and Florida needed to be, too.

A day before the election it was hard not to predict a Kerry landslide not only in Florida but across the country.

The MoveOn syndrome can be mainly attributed to the exposure of such a Kerry-centric environment. I was living in a Republican county, yet felt as if Kerry supporters hung from the town’s orange trees. And in the midst of it all, I was having nightly phone chats with another swing-state volunteer in Nevada. A woman named Elizabeth with whom I was smitten, mad smitten.

Elizabeth was working in Las Vegas for America Coming Together (ACT), a 527 and a partner program to MoveOn Voter Education. At night I would take a break and walk the humid streets of Melbourne sharing my campaign stories. “So he said: ‘I’m a lifelong Republican, but you’ve got to have shit for brains to vote for Bush. My neighbor doesn’t know what he’s doing!’” We’d laugh, and then she’d tell stories of driving Kerry-supporting Las Vegas high-school kids to canvas.

That night before the election, I fell asleep and dreamed of a Kerry victory. My first Electoral College wet dream.

On Election Day, I arrived at the Cocoa Presbyterian Church at 6:30 a.m., set up my MoveOnPAC booth 50 feet from the polling place, staked my hand-drawn “Vote Kerry? Say Hi” signs into the ground and waited. Armed with my Kerry-supporter lists from the online database and a cell phone, ready to call voters to make sure they were headed to the polls.

Around 9 a.m. my election outlook started to change.

As large trucks fashioned with simple “W” bumper stickers rolled into the lot, I was reminded that not everyone saw the need for regime change. A sweet elderly woman dressed in red, white and blue stopped to tell me that if she were president for one day she’d put an end to all those pesky labor unions. By noon, all my 187 voters had been contacted. I called into the MoveOn office and was directed to another precinct.

I spent the remainder of the day at a community center, camped out with a diverse crew of local supporters who’d made election day a celebratory picnic. In the waning hours of the afternoon, I contacted over 100 voters and wore out three cell-phone batteries. Groups of people swarmed around our tailgate. Family friends stopped by with words of encouragement. A reporter from the local paper inquired about voting irregularities (none had been witnessed).

As the sun set, I introduced myself to the W supporters on the other side of the park. They shook my hand and commented on how much they liked my glasses. What gracious losers, I thought.

Back in the MoveOnPAC office, Nick announced that a total of 8,500 Kerry supporters were identified in Brevard County. I gave him a hug and congratulated his tremendous effort. That was the last time I felt good on Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004.

At midnight, half drunk, I sat with fellow volunteers and stared at the ocean in disbelief. Did we not work hard enough? Holding back tears and rage, I called Elizabeth. She was in shock as well, determined to leave Las Vegas as soon as possible and never return. I vowed to never return to Florida or any other red state for that matter.

But is this how we should choose to respond?

In the days after the election, I received an e-mail from Eli Pariser of MoveOnPAC addressed to all the volunteers and members with the subject, “Because of you, there is hope.” In the letter, he cites Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Perhaps patience, a belief in justice and some good dreams are all we need for the next four years.