A Democratic Super PAC With Sex, Guns, and Swearing

In an election year when the Koch brothers and casino king Sheldon Adelson have deployed their fortunes for Republicans, there’s been little written about political operator Mik Moore. He’s a left-leaning New Yorker who runs a super PAC working to keep Barack Obama in the White House. His weapon of choice: a string of funny, off-color videos starring comedian Sarah Silverman and actor Samuel L. Jackson. The group’s latest effort, released on Sept. 27, has the Pulp Fiction star telling voters to “wake the f- - - up!” and vote for Obama. The four-minute ad, written by Adam Mansbach and available in both explicit and bleeped versions on the Web, is based on Mansbach’s 2011 bestseller for parents, Go the F**k to Sleep. (Jackson read the audio version of the book, too.) In another video, Silverman offers to have “traditional lesbian sex” with Adelson, the 79-year-old billionaire chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands, if he’ll give his pledged $100 million to Obama’s campaign instead of Romney’s.

Moore, 38, is co-executive director of the Jewish Council for Education & Research (JCER), a super PAC that first gained attention in summer 2008 with The Great Schlep, an ad in which Silverman urged young people to “schlep” to Florida to lobby 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.”) In April the super PAC received a $200,000 donation from Alex Soros, son of billionaire George Soros. That money is helping fund as many as a dozen videos, 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,” says Moore, who estimates his total budget is between $300,000 and $400,000.