MoveOn.org invites average Americans to express their (unfavorable) sentiments about the Bush administration in a TV ad of their own creation.
By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published December 26, 2003
Whatever their politics, most Americans agree on one thing: Political ads are too slick and too expensive.
Untold millions of the dollars raised for next year's presidential campaign will gush into the coffers of advertising agencies and consultants. Candidates of every party say ads, especially television ads, are a necessary evil, the only way to get their messages to a nation of blink-length attention spans.
How much does it cost to create a half-minute TV ad? If it's part of Bush in 30 Seconds, not a penny.
Bush in 30 Seconds is an online competition, open to anyone, to create "the ad that best explains what this President and his policies are really about."
Because Bush in 30 Seconds is a project of MoveOn.org, these aren't "Re-elect President Bush" ads. MoveOn says it is nonpartisan, but nobody would mistake it for the GOP's public relations firm.
One ad posted at the site (www.bushin30seconds.org) shows a man listening to TV news about $87-billion to provide education and health care in postwar Iraq. He raises an eyebrow at the camera and says, "Maybe we can get him to invade here."
In "Child's Pay," grim, gray scenes show small children hauling garbage and mopping hallways, with the tag line "Guess who's going to pay off President Bush's $1-trillion deficit?"
"Dissidence Is Patriotic" takes a wacky satirical tack. Figures with goofy pasted-on heads of Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials cavort to a snarky country song: "Our polls and the Nasdaq looking grim/Took a lesson from my daddy and bombed a Muslim."
That's just a sample. A teensy sample. Eli Pariser, MoveOn's campaigns director, says the group expected to get maybe 300 submissions when it posted the contest in October.
"We got more than 1,500," he says. "It was amazing."
Through Wednesday, more than 1,000 of those ads are available at the Web site. Anyone can log in, watch ads and rate them. Two days after they were posted, Pariser says, more than 50,000 people had made 700,000 rankings. "We'll be over 1-million in a day or so."
The 15 highest-ranked ads will be evaluated by a panel of celebrity judges that includes musicians Moby, Michael Stipe and Eddie Vedder; actors Jack Black, Jessica Lange and Tony Shalhoub; comedians Margaret Cho and Janeane Garofalo; filmmakers Michael Moore, Michael Mann and Gus Van Sant; music mogul Russell Simmons; author Al Franken; and political honchos James Carville and Donna Brazile.
The winning ad will be announced Jan. 12 and broadcast during the week of Bush's State of the Union address. The original plan was to air it in swing states, but Pariser says it might be used in other contexts. "We're waiting to see what the winning ad looks like."
Inviting people not only to make their own ads but to help pick the winner was a brilliant stroke, Morris Reid says. Reid, who held several posts in the Clinton administration, is managing director of Westin Rinehart Group, a communications consulting and lobbying firm.
"That's the whole buzz" drawing people to MoveOn's site, he says. "It's like the Super Bowl ads. Everybody wants to pick up the paper the next day to see who won. Americans love that."
MoveOn's history, he says, has been "grass roots organizing at its finest."
"And they're really smart about staying with their strength. A lot of grass roots organizations get successful and forget about their roots.
"MoveOn is smart enough to know they can't be a one-trick pony. They know their members have to feel they're continually being brought into the process."
MoveOn began in 1998 as Censure and Move On, founded by software entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd. The couple, whose Berkeley Systems company was best known for creating flying toasters screen savers, started the bipartisan group out of frustration with how Congress was dealing with the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The group called for censure of President Bill Clinton so the country could move past it.
Pariser, 23, was the founder of 9-11Peace.org, an online petition calling for a peaceful response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The petition drew half a million signers worldwide, and Pariser soon joined forces with MoveOn, with 9-11Peace.org becoming MoveOn Peace.
MoveOn was created and thrives on the Internet. Its six staff members have no office but work independently from across the country. The organization's mastery of the medium last year won it a Webby award, the Internet equivalent of the Oscar, in the political category.
According to the group's Web site, it has about 2-million members, and its mission is to give ordinary citizens a political voice by building "electronic advocacy groups" to counteract the dominance of big money and special interest groups.
Although MoveOn is involved in a number of causes, its current focus is the 2004 presidential election, and its goal is to replace Bush.
Danny Diaz, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, declined to comment on the Bush in 30 Seconds competition.
Lindsay Taylor, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, says, "We understand grass roots and have for some time. We believe the best way to get people energized is to have a positive message and a positive leader.
"Unfortunately, MoveOn's message is based on negativity and pessimism. While that may excite some people, we believe we have a more positive approach." The MoveOn.org Voter Fund was created to sponsor ads challenging Bush's policies, especially in swing states. Its professionally made "Misleader" TV and newspaper ads started appearing in July.
On Nov. 21, the Republican National Committee aired its first Bush campaign ad. In a clip from Bush's last State of the Union address, he warns of terrorist attacks. Then words flash onscreen: "Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists."
The ad brought a quick and angry response from Democratic presidential hopefuls. MoveOn responded just as quickly. Within hours, it e-mailed its members, asking for donations to the voter fund to help counter the ad.
Five hours later, it had raised half a million dollars.
Philanthropists George Soros and Peter Lewis have pledged to match every $2 donation to the voter fund with a dollar of their own, up to $5-million. MoveOn will use the fund, which could be as much as $15-million, to buy airtime during the presidential campaign.
Bush in 30 Seconds is part of the voter fund effort. Pariser says he had been thinking about an ad contest over the summer.
"It turns out Moby and Jonathan Soros (George Soros' son) had been thinking about something similar, and it all came together." Pariser, Moby and Soros, along with a small team, created the contest. "It's a way to identify the really incredibly creative people among our members."
The number of entries was not the only surprise. "One of the things that's most amazing is the really high quality of the ads," Pariser says.
Some of the ads came from professional agencies, he says, but many came from nonprofessionals: students, families, groups of friends.
MoveOn's constituency is technology-savvy, and it shows in their use of computers, video and audio. Many of the ads are as polished as professional products.
Others are heartfelt but rough around the edges, like the ones with little kids trying to play their roles seriously but unable to resist mugging for the camera.
A few are outdated by the capture of Saddam Hussein. Some are just strident venting instead of persuasion, and a few - like the guy unzipping his pants at the edge of the woods behind the words "A good use for a bush" - are just plain rude.
Pariser says most of the ads submitted were posted for voting. "We looked for copyright problems, any possible violations of election laws, things like that," he says, but the team did not judge the ads for quality. "We let the process work."
It took two days longer than expected to get the ads up because of the big response, and the site has been tweaked frequently to make it work better. "It's an amazing amount of data. We're talking about terrabites, which are thousands of gigabytes each," Pariser says.
On Dec. 17, the first day the ads were posted, it was difficult even to get onto the site. By Monday, ads were loading rapidly. The site had added such features as a button to let viewers e-mail an ad and a note reminding them of the last ad viewed and providing its average rating.
Pariser says there has been some negative response to the site. "It's been very minimal. You always have a few people, but we're talking a couple of dozen of those e-mails compared to more than 50,000 rating the ads. We're really proud of that."
Reid says the response to Bush in 30 Seconds is part of a larger trend toward grass roots political activism. "The most interesting things in politics today are not happening in Washington. The most interesting things are what happened in Florida and what happened in California," he says, citing the 2000 presidential election debacle and the recall that put Arnold Schwarzenegger in office.
But MoveOn does not have a corner on the Internet organizing market, Reid says. "This is not only a phenomenon unique to the Democrats, as some people think it is. The Republicans are just as sophisticated.
"They've been a little slower picking up on this, but you're going to see more of it during the Bush campaign. They learned during the last election cycle. Republicans are not asleep at the switch on this."
Pariser sees the response to Bush in 30 Seconds as that same kind of grass roots impulse. After all, no one is getting a prize for the best ad. "Just that the ad gets run.
"I think people did it out of a genuine concern about the Bush policies and an impulse to get involved."
