The leaders of the grassroots, Internet-based political phenomenon MoveOn.org were surprised when their national contest to create an anti- President Bush TV ad attracted hundreds of thousands of participants.

Now, the question is whether the winning ad, which will air next week in a $15 million campaign in key electoral battlegrounds, will surprise the political establishment by having an impact beyond what it already has achieved.

A young girl is shown doing janitorial work in this still photo from winning ad Child's Pay. Photo from video by Charlie Fisher

The winner of the "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest, one of the most visually arresting of the entries, is called "Child's Pay," by Charlie Fisher of Denver.

The ad shows young children working on assembly lines, checking groceries and working as janitors. The ad concludes: "Guess who's going to pay off President Bush's $1 trillion deficit."

It was chosen from among 14 finalists, each attacking the policies of the Bush administration in ads ranging from hard-hitting to humorous, and announced Monday night at a celebrity-studded gala in New York City.

The ads, which can be seen at the Web site www.Bushin30seconds.org, are uniformly angry about Bush policies and allege that the administration has been less than truthful with the American people.

"A lot of people are gravely concerned about the direction President Bush is taking our country," said MoveOn.org Executive Director Peter Schurman. "A lot of people have found creative, witty, poignant and powerful ways to express that concern."

The contest was begun in December and was intended to tap a creativity outside the customary and exclusive circle of Washington media consultants who produce most of the national political advertising.

"We thought we'd get a few hundred ads," Schurman said.

Instead, 1,500 ads were submitted from all over the nation. When MoveOn members were asked to rate the ads online, more than 175,000 individuals participated, offering more than 2 million ratings.

The result was the 14 finalists, which were submitted for final review to a panel of judges, including movie star Jack Black, Democratic political strategists Donna Brazile and James Carville, comedian Margaret Cho, author- comedian Al Franken, recording artists Moby, Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and author-filmmaker Michael Moore.

The winning ad "Child's Pay" is scheduled to air throughout next week, timed to appear before and after President Bush's State of the Union address next Tuesday.

MoveOn will spend $15 million to buy time on TV stations in "battleground states," where the voting could have swung either way in the 2000 presidential election, Schurman said. The ads will not air in California.

MoveOn's plans represent a substantial media buy, said political science Professor Jack Pitney of the Claremont Colleges, but that doesn't translate into impact.

"The flame burns hot but narrow," he said. "The MoveOn material in general and the ads in particular are designed to make angry people even angrier, but they don't necessarily broaden the anti-Bush coalition," he said.

And, Pitney said, "it could complicate things."

Indeed, it already has. Two the contest submissions, posted on the Web site along with all the others, equated Bush's statements with the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler.

The ads were denounced by Republicans and others, and they were pulled from the Web site as MoveOn co-founder Wes Boyd acknowledged they were in "poor taste" and expressed regret they had "slipped through" the screening process and had been posted on the Web site.

Wes Boyd (left) and Joan Blades founded MoveOn.org, an Internet political action group that produced the ad contest. Chronicle photo by Darryl Bush

Even without inflammatory Nazi imagery, Republicans found plenty objectionable in the remaining ads.

"They should rename their contest '30 Seconds of Fear and Loathing,' '' said Christine Iverson, press secretary for the Republican National Committee. "There is not a single positive message in any of those ads. They're promoting protest, pessimism, negativity and personal attacks on the president of the United States."

But if the point of the contest was to develop sophisticated, anti-Bush TV ads built from the ground up, the 14 finalist ads have a style and polish that could compete with anything currently airing on television.

And they hew closely to the basic liberal claims that Bush policies have produced job losses, skyrocketing federal deficits and tax cuts for the wealthy. The ads also accuse the president of deceiving the American people about the reasons leading to the war in Iraq as well as weakening environmental regulations and civil rights.

Most of the ads are serious in tone, but there is the occasional touch of humor, such as "Hood Robbin'," by Nathania Vishnevsky of Foster City. Her ad depicts a man dressed in a Robin Hood costume and wearing a Bush mask taking toys from children, ripping down drapes to reveal a naked man and picking the pocket and stealing the cane of an elderly man. All the loot is turned over to a man at the entrance to a corporate headquarters.

The contest is a project of the MoveOn.org Voter Fund, an offshoot of MoveOn.org, an Internet political action group created by Boyd and Joan Blades of Berkeley, who made millions from their own computer product -- the famous flying toaster screen saver.

Five years ago, frustrated by the national political dialogue they circulated an online petition calling for a swift end to the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton, asserting that the country wanted to "move on."

Since then, MoveOn.org merged with another similar organization, has grown to more than 1.7 million members and has become a force that can produce hundreds of thousands of online petition signatures advocating other policy positions.

MoveOn.org is nonpartisan and under the laws governing its formation cannot advocate on behalf or against any candidate. It can, however, "educate" voters about issues and candidates, and in that regard it is clearly opposed to the president.

Similarly, MoveOn.org Voter Fund can't involve itself in specifically opposing or supporting a candidate.

MoveOn has formed its own political action committee, MoveOn.org PAC, and it will weigh in directly on political campaigns, Schurman said.

But MoveOn.org Voter Fund and the ads, Schurman said, have a different goal.

"The point is to influence voters -- not to reach them through the elite media -- and to educate them about the failures of President Bush's policies," he said.

©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

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