Design for Obama

This article was originally published in German by Der Freitag on December 4, 2009.

I voted for Obama, I donated to his campaign, and in spite of significant disappointments, I’ve got no regrets. And yet it’s hard not feel a twinge of sadness and even irritation when flipping through the collection of Obama election posters that Taschen Verlag has just published. The campaign enthusiasm that made the book possible has dissipated; the Democratic congressional majorities are weakened by internal bickering, and Obama, by continuing past policies such as rendition and the ban on gays in the military, has imbued the campaign slogans of “Hope” and “Change” with lamentable irony. And yet the collection is also a reminder of one of Obama’s most important strengths: his ability to appeal to people of disparate ethnic and economic backgrounds by emphasizing different aspects of his own identity. And in fact two of the posters (e.g., "He Listens", right) in Design for Obama show the candidate in outline, without facial features, reminding me of the time he told an Iowa audience that he was “an imperfect vessel for your hopes and dreams.”

In the summer before the election, a graphic design student named Aaron Perry-Zucker founded a website, designforobama.org, as an outlet for amateurs and professionals to submit poster ideas for the Obama campaign. According to Perry-Zucker, at one point the site was receiving dozens of posters a day. Spike Lee heard about the project, and helped connect Perry-Zucker to Taschen. Design for Obama features over 200 of “the best” submissions.

The book’s inside cover features 180 of the posters in miniature: a sea of Obama faces next to recurring texts - “Hope,” and “Change,” and “Yes We Can.” There's Obama as latter day JFK, Obama as Superman ("Man of Hope," Robt Seda-Schreiber, left), or, more inanely, Obama as rock star or basketball player. It would be easy to mock many of them for sentimentality or naïveté or to criticize the heroic depictions of Obama. And in fact one American critic, Michael J. Lewis, has belittled images of Obama by labeling them “devotional art,” to which one can only respond: Yes, and what of it? In 2004, hardly any artists were moved to heroic depictions of John Kerry, and grassroots leftist organizations produced material that criticized Bush mercilessly while failing to muster enthusiasm for his opponent. Performance activists like Billionaires for Bush staged mock demonstrations, artists such as Richard Serra and James Rosenquist contributed anti-Bush work to a special election issue of ArtForum, and MoveOn.org ran an anti-Bush video contest. If John Kerry had been able to inspire even a little sentimental devotion, he may well have won the election.

From the beginning, the Obama campaign tried—usually—to create a positive image for itself rather than merely making opponents look bad. The campaign’s emphasis on design was no small part of the excitement that the campaign generated. Many found great significance just in his choice of font ("You Had Me at Gotham," Ryan Masterlaz). The Gotham font, wrote Alice Rawsthorn in The New York Times, “conveys a potent, if unspoken, combination of contemporary sophistication … with nostalgia for America's past and a sense of duty.” The “O” logo elicited similar praise, despite being vaguely reminiscent of Pepsi’s. The logo’s creator, Sol Sender, has said he didn’t originally envision all the creative ways in which people would adapt the “O.”

In Design for Obama, you can find designers playing with the logo and font to make the candidate seem more traditional and rural (“States United”, Renee Graef):


In fact, while some of the posters confirm the criticism that Obama imagery tends to be hagiographic—several of the posters in Design for Obama use the “O” as a halo —


many more of the visuals undermine any piety by portraying the candidate as a regular guy or as someone supported— joyously — by people on the street:
or by playfully emphasizing things like his environmental policy ("Polar Bears for Obama," Christopher McInerney).


The aesthetic merit of such posters is minimal, but they document the light-hearted mirth of Obama supporters who were, and are, too often characterized as zealous acolytes. The poster that caught Spike Lee’s attention and led to the publication of the book was itself a persiflage of the poster for Lee’s 1989 film, Do the Right Thing.
Designer Don Button pasted Obama’s face on the body of the pizza deliverer and Biden’s face on the body of the Italian restaurant owner—not exactly a gesture of reverence. And yet the poster can be viewed as showing how much the country had changed since Lee had made his film about a race riot that ended in the destruction of the Italian’s pizza shop. If Obama has grown weaker in the past year, it’s not because the racial coalition has weakened. Instead, the political coalition is what's looking vulnerable — in part because of the intractability of the problems Obama inherited, in part because Obama made unnecessary and unwise compromises to his agenda, and in part because many of his followers have failed to maintain their interest in politics past election day. On the last score, Design for Obama is testament to the speed with which a cult of personality can vanish in a democracy.

Recommended Economics Links

I just tried to post this to an Economist blog several times, to no avail, so I thought I'd post these recommendations for finance/investment sites here, instead.

John Hussman is an economist and fund manager, and his weekly comments usually provide an interesting take on the markets. He's outperformed the indices over a variety of timeframes, although he's still negative for the year.

He doesn't write often, but when Jeremy Grantham publishes commentary on the GMO site, it should be read. He would've had you in cash well before the credit crisis.

The "Bloomberg on the Economy" podcast is super--about 15 min.-30 min. of interviews with Tom Keene that are on a pretty high level.

Wolfgang Münchau at FT.com is excellent, as is Martin Wolf. Actually, the whole line-up of columnists at the FT is outstanding.

The site's strongly associated with Jim Cramer, who has a terrible public persona, but RealMoney.com is actually very good for seeing what traders are thinking, and I especially like Doug Kass's comments on RealMoney "Silver." The "Columnist Conversation" feature gives readers the chance to see the site's writers provoking and challenging each other in a way I haven't seen done anywhere else on the Web.

For quick overviews, I like the following:
Abnormal Returns
RealClearMarkets
RGE Monitor
AllTop
Bloomberg

Most of these sites assume some knowledge of economics and the markets. If you're just starting to learn, books are a better resource than the web. I'll do a book list later.

I also think it's important to know which information sources should be avoided, and I'll try to make a couple of posts about that in the near future.

Highlights of Today’s Reading:

1.
The NYT on the Philharmonic’s first performance in North Korea: “It was the first hint of a broader thaw in a half-century long cultural stand-off between North Korea and the United States. Introducing Gershwin’s "American in Paris," Lorin Maazel, the Philharmonic’s music director, said, "Someday a composer may write a work entitled “Americans in Pyongyang.””

To which I thought: Hopefully not a march.

2.
Julian Baggini has a short but clever review of Slavoj Žižek’s Violence in which he faults Žižek for repetitiveness, overreliance on Lacan, and a compulsion to identify everything by its paradoxical nature. He also criticizes him for making unsupported assertions, as when Žižek writes that George Soros has “ruined the lives of thousands.” Although one still comes away from the review with the impression that Baggini’s respect for Žižek is not insignificant, the criticisms are damning and point out fundamental shortcomings that Žižek is unlikely to fix in the future.

3.

I hope Robert Shiller has a role to play in the next administration. His proven foresight would inspire confidence.