What do you do when you work furiously hard to win but lose anyway? Laura Dawn and her colleagues at MoveOn.org are trying to find an answer to that very question – just as President Bush prepares for his inauguration next week. The liberal online group was founded in 1998 as a grassroots political advocacy organization; Ms. Dawn joined its ranks a year ago as events and cultural director, but she is equally well known for her passion for punk music.

She was introduced to the organization by Moby, the diminutive downtown musician whom Ms. Dawn has counted as a friend, chess partner, and collaborator for years. She sang backup on Moby recordings and at his concerts, but the two really got their groove on when they created the ad competition “Bush In Thirty Seconds” for MoveOn last fall. Television pros and amateurs alike submitted their homemade ads on video to the competition. “We expected a few dozen entries, but it went through the roof,” Ms. Dawn says. Out of hundreds of submissions, one was chosen for broadcast.

The Laura Dawn story began as the Laura Dawn Galpin story in Pleasantville, Iowa (population 1,000). Her father was a butcher at a meatpacking plant and is now a farmer whom his daughter describes as “a guy who shoes horses, the last of the Marlboro men.” Iowans are introduced early to politics as a result of the state’s caucuses every four years. But Ms. Dawn’s activist spirit took hold in the mid-1980s, when her father was locked out of his meatpacking job with the Filands company, which padlocked the gates of the plant and left town overnight after raiding the employees’ pension fund. “My dad is a guy who played by the rules, showed up early at work to sharpen his knives to do a job that not many people would want or could do. He taught me that the American dream meant that hard work gets rewarded. But his experience proved just the opposite.”

She was the first in her family to go to college, at the Central University of Iowa, and moved to New York City after graduation to pursue a music career, which had begun with a high school gig singing oldies in a stage show at Iowa’s only theme park, Adventure Land. Once in Gotham, she supported herself waiting tables and working the night shift at Lehman Brothers on the graphics staff. “I worked 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., but I was able to sleep and rehearse during downtime.”

She also became the lead singer and songwriter of the all-girl punk band Fluffer, which became popular on the New York club scene but never earned enough to allow its members to quit their day jobs. The band split after four years and Ms. Dawn garnered a solo record deal six months later. That’s when the powers that be at Extasy, a Warners subsidiary label, pushed her to drop her last name and record as Laura Dawn, under which she recorded her chick-pop solo album, “Believer,” released in the grim weeks after September 11, 2001. Sales weren’t brisk. Though she still sings backup at benefits, Ms. Dawn says she’s “happier now that music is not my life’s work. It’s a messed-up industry.”

And so she has devoted herself to politics – arguably an equally problematic line of work. Since the election, MoveOn and its political action committee have been polling members to get a sense of what issues need addressing as they move forward. Foremost among those, she says, is rethinking the cultural issues that dominated the last campaign.

Ms. Dawn says that the left fell into the trap of mocking Mr. Bush. “Bush’s malapropisms united him with many people out there in the country. By calling him a hick, the left played right into Karl Rove’s hands.” She also feels that the American progressive movement has to reframe its own strategic assumptions. “It is like playing chess with someone who moves their own pieces away,” Ms. Dawn says.

Despite the conservative sweep in November, the 34-year-old is proud of MoveOn’s accomplishments. “There’s never been anything like it. The Internet has truly revolutionized politics. With about 2.8 million members, we’re only about 1% of the national population, and look at the ruckus we caused!”

Ms. Dawn says that the left needs to take a page from the right’s playbook and be true to their ideals. “A Republican activist recently observed, ‘The Democrats are reality-based. They look at what reality is and adjust their actions accordingly. The Republicans are self-defined, they are in a state of nature, not reacting to reality.’ Republicans just act.” Ms. Dawn and her colleagues at MoveOn will be spending the next few years making sure Democrats do, too.