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.
