MoveOn’s Brains Aim Straight for Heart

Smash! Crash! Crunch!

Bill Zimmerman and Pacy Markman have unleashed a band of marauding elephants on Washington, D.C., and they chortle merrily as their mischief plays across a computer screen in their Santa Monica office.

The U.S. Capitol: Stomp! The White House: Kaput!

For 2 1/2 years, the political partners have been the creative force behind MoveOn, the brick-heaving advocacy group that has energized Democrats, infuriated Republicans and distilled the rage of the left into a series of attention-grabbing advertisements, like the spot showing cartoon elephants -- the symbol of the GOP -- gone wild.

Subtle they are not.

Markman, who spent years pitching products like Alka-Seltzer, Midas mufflers and Coca-Cola -- and has the glib patter to prove it -- offers this: “Advertising is about conveying a simple idea in a powerful way to somewhere below the neck of the person you’re talking to.”

In other words, skip the brain and aim for the heart. Or the gut. Oomph!

MoveOn, which grew out of a petition drive opposing President Clinton’s impeachment, has exploded into the country’s largest and most powerful online advocacy group, with a nationwide following of more than 3 million members. MoveOn and its sister organizations raised $60 million in the 2004 campaign -- far exceeding an original goal of $10 million -- and has scarcely let up since, collecting millions more to target the White House and Republicans in Congress. Coming soon: the battle over the U.S. Supreme Court.

Zimmerman and Markman have produced more than 50 ads for MoveOn since their first one broadcast in January 2003. Their latest, calling for the firing of presidential advisor Karl Rove, began airing Wednesday in Washington and New York City. MoveOn accounts for roughly half the business of their seven-member firm, Zimmerman & Markman, housed in a Spanish-style office complex near the Third Street Promenade; the rest of their time is spent on various initiative campaigns. Their successes include passage of Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law, Arizona’s campaign-finance overhaul and last year’s California measure hiking taxes on those making more than $1 million to expand mental health programs and help the homeless.

The two have been in business together close to 15 years. Zimmerman is long and lean, with sharp, angular features; Markman is shorter, softer. Both are 64 years old. During a recent lunch interview, they wore the casual uniform of the self-employed: jeans and open-collar shirts. They don’t quite finish each other’s sentences. But they know each well enough to fill in the gaps in their respective life stories.

Each grew up in a middle-class family and became politically aware during the civil rights movement. Both followed roundabout routes to political work: Zimmerman started as an expert in sleep research before leaving academia to protest the Vietnam War. Markman drifted into advertising after he failed to get a TV job reporting on the early space program.

Their list of clients, past and present, reads like the pages of a left-wing telephone directory: the American Civil Liberties Union, Greenpeace, the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, People for the American Way. It seems that even the Democratic Party, with its fitful feints to the middle, is not entirely to their taste.

“We’re not Democratic Party loyalists,” Zimmerman says. “We’re progressives who support the Democratic Party because it’s the best vehicle for achieving the kind of political power that could get us to where we want to go. But Democrats aren’t all good, and Republican’s aren’t all bad. It depends on the issue.”

Their ads are filled with the stock characters of liberal wrath: greedy pharmaceutical companies, rapacious industrialists and, of course, a president who is unfailingly portrayed as wrongheaded, duplicitous and, at times, plain silly.

But there is often something more -- a touch of whimsy, a narrative thread, an emotional tug -- that lends their advertising its power. In one spot, assailing Bush’s economic policies, a worn-out middle-aged worker drives past a closed industrial plant and pulls up with resignation to his new job -- a fast-food joint, as revealed in the final scene. In another of their ads, a mother, her face a tear-streaked knot of pain, recounts her soldier son’s death in Iraq. It feels voyeuristic, but it is virtually impossible to look away.

For people employed in the business of imagination, the two harbor few illusions. “People don’t turn on TV to be educated,” Markman says. “You’re interrupting their show.... You may want to make them angry or sad or make them laugh. But there are certain constraints. You don’t want to announce in the first five seconds it’s a political ad. You’re trying to move people into something they’re not really that interested in.”

Republican leaders assail MoveOn as an extremist group, using words like “vulgar” and “beyond the pale” to describe some of its advertising. Zimmerman and Markman delight at the criticism, though each was quick to disavow the most infamous MoveOn ad, a spot that likened Bush to Adolf Hitler and ended up hurting the group’s image more than the president’s.

The clip was submitted as part of a contest and was removed from MoveOn’s website, with a statement of regret. Markman and Zimmerman seem almost as professionally peeved as personally offended. “It made a comparison that was silly and just uncalled for,” Markman says. “And ineffective,” Zimmerman added.

Of course, all the money in the world and the best advertising won’t move people who aren’t buying what you’re selling. And, nationally, it has been not a terribly fruitful climate for liberal candidates and causes over the past 25 or so years.

Indeed, for all its success, MoveOn and its legion of followers failed to prevent the impeachment of Clinton, force the ouster of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or prevent the invasion of Iraq, among other efforts.

“Yeah, what’s your point?” Markman snaps, his face creased in a scowl before the two men burst out laughing. By now, the interview has moved to their office. Zimmerman tilts back in his swivel chair, hands laced behind his head. “We failed to win the presidency. We failed to stop the war,” he concedes. “But an organization has been built of 3.5 million people, ... and they are people ready to be activated in a variety of ways. Writing letters. Going to demonstrations. Visiting members of Congress, in addition to contributing money. What that tells me is, in spite of those failures, we’re offering people something they want.”

Zimmerman reaches back to 1964, the year Republicans hit bottom before clawing their way back to political power. “We’re in a similar position,” Zimmerman says.

“We may not turn this around in ’06 or ’08. But we’re trying to build the tools, and this is just one of many -- MoveOn -- that can lead to more progressive politics for our children, if not ourselves.”

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The creative force

* Pacy Markman was named for his maternal grandfather, whose given name was Pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover, but whom everyone called Pacy.

* One of Markman’s earliest political memories is his mother driving voters to the polls in their hometown of Baltimore. When voters returned with proof they had cast their ballot -- presumably for the Democratic candidate -- they got a shot of whiskey from her.

* During his time in commercial advertising, Markman came up with the slogan for Miller Lite: “Everything you always wanted in a beer

* Bill Zimmerman received a PhD in psychology from the University of Chicago. His dissertation compared light sleepers with deep sleepers, measured through several hundred psychological and physiological dimensions. He is a very heavy sleeper who can nod off just about anywhere.

* In the course of establishing a sleep research laboratory at the City University of New York, Zimmerman grew dismayed when he learned the federal government was interested in applying some of his work toward development of new biological weapons. He faced a “crisis of conscience” and decided he could no longer pursue his research.

* On his office wall, Zimmerman has a photograph of Albert Einstein -- a reminder, he says, of the dangers of misapplying science. He also has a disabled M-16 rifle, captured by the North Vietnamese and later passed on to Salvadoran revolutionaries. “It’s a potent symbol of how the U.S. gave guns to the wrong people in the wrong places, and some of those guns ended up being pointed back toward us,” Zimmerman says.

Los Angeles Times