Advocacy group winnows hundreds of anti-Bush ads to 15
BETH FOUHY, Associated Press Writer Monday, January 5, 2004
(01-05) 19:08 PST SAN FRANCISCO (AP) --
Ask liberals to participate in an advertising contest dubbed "Bush in 30 Seconds," and you'll get more than a few negative entries.
Children toiling on a grocery checkout line to pay the bill for the nation's budget deficit. Faces of American soldiers killed in Iraq paired with video of President Bush making the case for war. An elfin Bush impersonator taking money from the elderly and delivering it to a corporate doorstep.
These are just some of the images from the 15 television ads selected as finalists Monday in the contest sponsored by the liberal online advocacy Web site, MoveOn.org. The contest generated some 1,500 submissions from amateur videographers critiquing President Bush and his policies.
"Our purpose was to tap into the huge creative pool outside the Beltway, and from that perspective, it totally succeeded," said Eli Pariser, Campaigns Director for the MoveOn.org Voter Fund. "We were amazed at the amount of new thinking we saw."
The 15 finalists -- produced in a range of non-Beltway locations including Foster City, Calif., Lawrence, Kan. and West Linn, Ore. -- were selected by more than 100,000 MoveOn members who viewed and voted on the submissions, which appeared on the organization's Web site. The winning ad will be chosen by a panel of Democratic activists including filmmaker Michael Moore and consultant James Carville and announced at a gala in New York next week. The ad will air during the week of Jan. 20, when Bush delivers his State of the Union address.
Not included among the 15 is a controversial submission comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler that has drawn angry protests from Jewish organizations and the Republican National Committee. The ad appeared on MoveOn's Web site during the voting period, which began Dec. 17. It was removed at the close of the contest Dec. 31.
"It is shocking that a mainstream political group like MoveOn.org not only allowed this vile and outrageous comparison of the American President to Adolf Hitler to be entered into its ... contest in the first place, but that they even went so far as to make it available to the public on the Internet," said Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League.
The Republican National Committee is running the ad on its own Web site, which Chairman Ed Gillespie has called "political hate speech." On Monday, he called upon the nine Democratic presidential contenders to renounce the ad.
Pariser defended the decision to include the ad at its site along with the hundreds of other submissions, saying the fact that it "sank to the bottom" among voters was a clear indication of the selection process working.
"The RNC isn't doing its homework, basically," Pariser said. "To go on TV saying we were promoting these vile ads is factually totally inaccurate."
MoveOn.org, which was founded by two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in 1998 to oppose the impeachment of President Clinton, has grown into a political powerhouse with 1.7 million members active on a range of issues, from campaign finance reform to opposing the war in Iraq. The organization announced months ago it intended to raise $10 million from its members to air anti-Bush ads through March. In November, billionaire philanthropist George Soros and his business partner Peter Lewis pledged a $5 million matching grant.
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