In an election year when the Koch brothers and casino king Sheldon Adelson have deployed their fortunes for Republicans, you’ve heard little about political operator Mik Moore. He’s a left-leaning New Yorker who runs a Jewish super PAC working to keep Barack Obama in the White House. His weapon of choice: a string of funny, intensely off-color videos starring comedian Sarah Silverman and actor Samuel L. Jackson.
The group’s latest hit the Internet on Thursday, with Jackson telling voters to “wake the f— up!” and vote for Obama. The four-minute ad, available in both original explicit and bleeped versions, is based on the 2011 book for parents, Go the F**k to Sleep, both of which were written by Adam Mansbach. (Jackson read the audio version of the book, too.) In another video, Silverman offers to have “traditional lesbian sex” with Adelson, the billionaire CEO of Las Vegas Sands (LVS), if he’ll donate his pledged $100 million to Obama’s campaign instead of Romney’s.
Moore, 38, is president of the Jewish Council for Education and Research (JCER), a super PAC that first gained attention in the summer of 2008 with “The Great Schlep,” an ad that featured Silverman urging young people to “schlep” to Florida and urge their grandparents to vote for Obama. (“If you knew that visiting your grandparents could change the world, would you do it? Of course you would. You’d have to be a douche-nozzle not to.”)
Four years later, the super PAC received a $200,000 donation in April from Alex Soros, the son of billionaire George Soros. (The senior Soros will donate $1 million to Priorities USA Action, a super PAC supporting Obama’s reelection effort, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.) That money is helping fund as many as a dozen videos in the runup to the Nov. 6 election, three of them already released. “We tend to work with a lot of comics because we feel humor is a good way of talking about issues that are hard to talk about,” Moore says. JCER will spend $300,000 to $400,000 on videos this year but will produce only as many as it can afford, he says.
After the Adelson video, Silverman produced one that decries new voter ID laws that have been enacted ahead of the 2012 election season. The video, “Get Nana a Gun,” features Silverman’s grandmother and notes that the new laws do not allow Social Security, military, or student ID cards as valid forms of identification. In Tennessee and Texas, however, a firearm permit with a photo is permissible for voting. The Department of Justice has challenged several of the new laws, and a federal court has blocked the Texas law. Silverman’s voter ID video had 1.8 million YouTube (GOOG) views by Sept. 27.
Until 2011, when he started his own consulting firm, Moore worked for Bend the Arc, a Jewish organization that promotes social justice. He has also worked for unions, government agencies, and on New York City Public Advocate Mark Green’s unsuccessful 2001 bid for mayor. “The area I’ve been working to innovate,” Moore says, “is looking at how you build campaigns built around media, particulate new media and social networks. I think you can leverage smaller amounts of money to have a much bigger impact.”
That’s the goal with the Silverman and Jackson videos, both of which have gone viral since they appeared on YouTube and sites like Yahoo! (YHOO), with additional traffic generated from news stories about them. While Moore won’t disclose who will appear in future videos to support Obama, he’s willing to dish one tidbit: “We will do videos that don’t have cursing in them at all.”
