Keenan, a stunning Irish American woman dressed in black velvet, now runs ads in college newspapers in swing states. They are designed by hip designers such as skateboard maven Eric Elms. They also run in design magazines such as Paper and Art Forum, though it's unclear how many undecided voters those publications reach.
Keenan says she couldn't sit back and watch her country be "confiscated" by Bush. But one bonus has been turning natural loners into a real community.
"There's a bit of a trendy factor, and it's very social," she says about D4D parties. "Everyone likes hanging out and we're all there for Kerry and we reconnect with dealers and artists we haven't seen in a while."
Raza says that when he went to his first D4D gathering, he expected khakis and button-down shirts, but that's not what he found. "These people are stylish. Wait, I can hang out with these people, this is fun," he remembers thinking. Within 45 minutes, he was handing out fliers and proselytizing.
For this latest Ohio trip, Raza wears a Gilbert and George shirt, limited-edition political art of the early '80s. "Are you angry or are you boring?" it says. He looks like he hasn't shaved in two days.
George W. Bush has a "brand" and by now D4D has built up a competing one, Raza says. "A lot of people hear the name and they associate it with cool parties and music and art, so we have this in.
"When people come to the party, it means they're interested in what's new and cool and hip and we just go around personifying that."
"Political art" has been somewhat flat since the '80s -- crude stuff involving "nudity and fire and welding," says Tran, that hits you over the head with dogma. But now, "people doing it are just like us; they're our friends. They have a comfort level with politics because politics is cool, politics is fashionable."
Hanging With Moby
The protest left didn't begin this way. The cool frenzy descended on it, taking it by surprise. Pariser, who helped make MoveOn.org the leading edge of Internet activism, is a politically serious kid who likes to tinker with computers. He's still all that, only now he occasionally gets to hang out with Moby or Jack Black or Eddie Vedder.
Pariser is the inverse of hip. He doesn't live in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn or downtown Manhattan, but in a deeply uncool part of midtown in an apartment stuffed with futons. He sports a beard, not two days of fashionable growth. His office is about the size of a closet, his computer rests on a game of Malarky.
How MoveOn got past the velvet rope still mystifies him. "It's like a kid who is not cool in eighth grade and all of a sudden he gets to high school and he's cool," says Pariser. "It wasn't so deliberate. It just kind of happened."
Asked how he feels about being No. 3 in Details magazine's list of the 50 most powerful men, Pariser seems genuinely embarrassed. "I don't know," he says, and puts his head in his hands. "I can't . . . " and quickly moves on to the next subject, which is the "cultural folks" -- his phrase for stars -- and how they can best be used to mobilize the masses.
Late last year, Laura Dawn, MoveOn's cultural outreach director and a singer, came up with a "Project Greenlight" for politics. She started with the idea that celebrities who lend themselves to politics "feel condescended to. They want you to smile and look pretty and go to fundraisers."
So instead she launched "Bush in 30 seconds," a contest inviting anyone to submit a political ad, with celebrities determining the results. Whatever it was -- the age of reality television, celebrity burnout, "Star Search" -- this mix of the famous and the famous manque sparked. Black, Vedder, Russell Simmons, Gus Van Sant, Janeane Garofalo, Moby and Michael Stipe helped judge the contest.
"I met them and it was a weird experience," says Pariser. "My role as leader of MoveOn clashed with my role as a 23-year-old guy, and I sort of flip-flopped back and forth. Half the time I was thinking, 'This is crazy,' and half the time it was humbling. Here I am at the nexis of such powerful people and the MoveOn base."
