WIRED ON FRIDAY/Danny O'Brien: The run-up to the US presidential election is a slow, stately and often stultifying boring spectacle. One gets the impression the American media, and maybe the public would be happier if it was a little more ... peppy.

Perhaps a dramatic, no holds barred, razz-a-matazz face-off: like the Superbowl, maybe.

This year, at least one Net advocacy organisation has been attempting to do that - drag the Superbowl into politics.

MoveOn.org has been one of dozens of Websites injecting new life into both Republican and Democrat grassroots campaigning. Democratic candidate Howard Dean credits his impressive fund-raising to online whip-rounds via his website. Bush supporters have been polishing their mettle with scathing deconstructions of the opposing side's positions, and day-by-day recaps of their man's successes on thousands of personal Weblogs.

But much of this activity, frenzied though it may be, has remained firmly buried in the virtual world. MoveOn.org, a fund-raising and activism site for the Democratic faithful, decided to take it a little further: right to the the Superbowl itself.

Late last year, MoveOn invited its two million or so regular readers to submit home-made video ads on the theme "Bush in 30 seconds".

Assisted by the increasingly professional video-editing technology that is available to the technically-savvy, hundreds of ads were submitted. Some were endearingly amateurish, some were professional. But all of them were uploaded by MoveOn to their website. And all were voted on by readers.

From the finalists picked by the readership, one - as judged by a rather less democratically chosen committee of such luminaries as Michael Moore and Janeane Garofalo - was chosen.

The winner is a simple little piece, using its 30 seconds to concentrate on just one theme: the Democrats concern with the high level of the current federal deficit. The alleged effect of the Bush administration's policy of high public borrowing on future generations is shown with a montage of small children working long hours in factories and cleaning jobs. It was directed and filmed by an ex-Republican ad executive with one cameraman.

MoveOn's plan, only revealed after the competition to its members, was to raise enough money to put this spot on during the Superbowl.

Even in the American media landscape, filled with promotions of every kind, Superbowl ads are nonetheless a world unto themselves. Thirty seconds here costs $1.6 million. Those 30 seconds, however, expose your message to traditionally the largest TV audience of the year.

Many companies spend millions more crafting expensive productions to fill their equally pricey spot - cinematic efforts that will never appear on TV again. But until now, no party has shown the chutzpah to put out a political message in the middle of America's sacred sports event.

Can a piece made for a few thousand dollars compete? Could the average viewer be inspired or annoyed to see presidential campaigning appear so early, and so in your face, as this? It's hard to tell. But, even in the advertising-driven world of American politics, simply attempting to harvest enough cash for a one-off Superbowl ad is impressive in itself. Especially when it comes from outside beltway politics.

MoveOn is far from officially supported by the Democratic Party themselves. If it has a physical location, that headquarters is as far away from Washington as you can be: in liberal San Francisco.

Its founders, Berkeley dotcom couple Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, originally set up to fight the Clinton impeachment over Monica Lewinsky. They gathered together individual Net users to fight for a policy of "censure and move on".

MoveOn.org itself is not without professional political advice (billionaire activist George Soros and Al Gore have both provided aid to the site, in public and with cash). The small team still claim they take their cues from their regular readers rather than the party hierarchy. And its supporters are mainly made up of what candidate Howard Dean has called "the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party" - and many others have labelled the unelectable left of US politics.

The MoveOn subscribers take strength in their own numbers, and their anger at what they see as their marginalisaton. The first MoveOn mailout in 1998 reached 300 readers. Now their e-mails go to two million of their "online activists".

Until now, the site has taken advantage of those numbers to drive what it calls flash campaigns: speedily using the Net to invite their subscribers to, for instance, flood their representatives with queries on a particular narrow topic.

Now, as they - and many other campaigning Websites - seek to influence the wider electorate, those numbers, and the Web's speed of organisation, begin to fade in importance. Two million recipients worldwide is a fair number on the Web - but are they a force among a reluctant voting population of a hundred million?

More important now is whether MoveOn's strategy - of expressing their partisan position directly, and openly - will work in the trickier, high-stakes world of presidential politics.

The openness of organising a campaign via the Internet has left MoveOn.org vulnerable. Long before they had announced their winners, conservative sites had uncovered a string of ad submissions to the Bush In 30 Seconds competition that directly equated George Bush with Adolf Hitler. MoveOn eventually withdrew the ads (which were scoring very low among their own video-voters).

But the damage was done - and jeering websites took advantage of MoveOn's liberal copyright licensing to host the offending ads themselves.

And while you can say anything on the Web - you can't say much on TV. CBS refused to show MoveOn's advertisement, saying that they generally decline advocacy advertising.

By that time, MoveOn had grabbed both the headlines - and raised the $1.6 million from its subscribers to put the ad. And rather than wanting their money back after CBS turned down the money, their liberal supporters are furious at such "censorship" - and eager to sponsor more activism.

Perhaps that's the strongest lesson of these giants of Web politics. It's s a lesson the most mainstream of Republicans and Democrats can understand. It's not the ad that MoveOn picked, or the way it picked it. But in this, as in any election you can name, it's the money that does most of the talking.