Obama vs. Romney: Presidential Campaign Branding

By Heather Turner

Branding undoubtedly plays a role in influencing voter perceptions of Presidential candidates. Ultimately, voter reactions to campaign images is subjective. That being said, if the election was solely based on image and branding, then President Barack Obama, is clearly winning.

Mitt Romney's camp is incredibly lacking in artistic or mind-blowing campaign posters (my search for iconic Romney art didn't go well). Rather, many of the images associated with Romney's campaign have typically been mashups, created by satirists and pretty much anyone with a sense of humor and Photoshop. In this way, Romney's campaign has been its own worst enemy and despite six years of preparing to run for the office of the Presidency, Team Romney still can't seem to inspire an image that is anywhere near as rhetorically powerful as this:

 coulda been 

a tramp stamp

Even when reproduced as a tattoo on a random appendage for some (probably drunken) reason, it is instantly recognizable as a rendition of the "Hope" poster designed by artist Shepard Fairey. Fairey's poster was adopted by Team Obama after the independently produced stencil portrait became viral. At the same time, to Conservatives, elements of Obama's branding, including the Fairey stencil, confirmed their perceptions of Obama being communistic and even a messianic figure of sorts to the political left wing.

The 2008 election set a high bar for image and branding excellency, as the most viral presidential candidate was also the one who got elected. In fact, Obama's election brought on a period of extreme "Baracksploitation," in which the President's image was applied to pretty much anything, from sushi, to t-shirts, to action figures, to hash bricks. The 2012 election was already going to be an uphill battle for anyone running against our resident Presidential icon.

However, whether or not a candidate's campaign "get it right" with their branding, candidates of both parties adopt rhetoric that draws from ubiquitous American national myths concerning 'God and country' to appeal to the electorate, as crafting a clear moral agenda is also a major aspect of Presidential branding. The national myths invoked by the previous four presidents reflects the complex historic and nationalistic, yet pseudo-religious identity of America.


Read the rest at Spin and the Media.

GOP's "nonsensical" Reagan Library debate

Wow, the level of crazy within the leading field of Republican presidential candidates has remained incredibly consistent throughout the string of irreverent debates. However, cutting through the side issues, the primary GOP PR strategy for the election centers on economic issues: government debt and job creation.

While the potential presidential candidates largely agreed on many issues, the hot topic of job creation resulted in some major talking points clashing into an unintelligible word salad. As The Nation's Ben Adler writes, the arguments the candidates are pushing in order to at least rhetorically position themselves as job creators are just "nonsensical":

The only major back and forth occurred around a curiously meaningless debate: which governor on stage presided over the most job growth and who would create the most jobs as president. For a party that claims government does nothing as well as the private sector and that efforts to improve society are a fools errand, it’s an odd obsession. If you believe, as Mitt Romney has repeatedly asserted, that it is business rather than government that creates jobs then how can you argue that you will do so as president?

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The governors all came prepared with job-related factoids to hurl at each other. “Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, Mitt,” said Perry, while Huntsman told Perry that forty-seventh best “just won’t cut it.” Romney countered that Texas created more jobs under Perry’s predecessor, George W. Bush, than under Perry. He also defended his record and minimized Perry’s by noting that Massachusetts and Texas have different political and economic conditions.

Although, Texas Governor Rick Perry and Mitt Romney had a "my state had more jobs than your state" pissing contest during the debate, both candidates easily play into the myth the Republican party relies on for votes: that government ... no. THE government, our government, is bad. Not only bad, but that it, and its most vital democratic institutions are not to be trusted. Controlling the political discourse on the economic issues plays well into the GOP 2012 electoral strategy. By constantly demonizing government and the positive roles it plays in our lives, a theme of deep seated mistrust of government and it's institutions emerges. Among some voters, an outright hatred of the government emerges. The apparent surge of extreme politicians in both the states and Congress, along with their determination to obstruct democratic processes at every turn, has opened the door to policies which undermine our democratic institutions to the benefit of powerful corporations. Former Republican Congressional Staffer, Mike Lofgren, describes how the Republican party essentially gets away with winning their self-perpetuating war on language:

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

 It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

Governor Rick Perry (TX) and Representative Ron Paul (TX) during commercial break.

Needless to say, the focus on stoking populist rage while bolstering polices that help businesses more than American citizens is no way to create jobs. It is almost laughable that such circular logic packaged in punchy soundbites can convince anyone that these candidates and their ideas should be taken seriously. However, I personally, cannot laugh at these people until everyone else is laughing too. Because we all should be. The real world implications of the GOP PR strategy translating into actual policies are already coming to fruition in dozens of states via union busting, de-funding or underfunding government services, and tightening voter registration requirements.

He Said, She Said?: Wikileaks vs. The Guardian

Someone sprung a leak! And it's still a bit difficult to tell where it came from.

According to Julian Assange, (and the lawyers representing Wikileaks), it was a reporter working for The Guardian. The Guardian has denied all responsibility. The trouble, Wikileaks alleges, all started when The Guardian's, David Leigh, published a lengthy encryption key in the February 2011 publication Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. The key was given to Leigh by Assange so that he could access an online file containing more than 250,000 uncensored US State Department diplomatic cables.

The point of contention could simply be miscommunication between Assange and Leigh. The Guardian claims both parties agreed the diplomatic cables would be available on an online server in July 2010 for a period of hours, after which, the files would be removed and the temporary server turned off. Assange denied this account in a recent interview with New Scientist, "The only thing that was temporary was the website location the file was stored in. But the password is not used for the website – it is used for decrypting the file."

However, the plot seemingly thickens, as questions remain over where and when the first bittorrent leaks occurred and at what point Wikileaks became aware that the files had become public. The BBC bluntly stated, "It has long been known that Wikileaks lost control of the cables even before they were published and that encrypted files are circulating on the internet." The Guardian also claims that after the initial leaked file surfaced on bittorrent, "At about 11pm on Wednesday [Aug. 31] an anonymous Twitter user discovered the published password and opened a separate file – not the one shared with the Guardian – that had also been circulating on file-sharing networks for several months."

What is clear is that at some point, the encrypted files containing the diplomatic cables had found their way onto bittorrent. However, writing for The Guardian, James Ball reports that the bittorrent file had not yet been discovered by the public: "By 10am on Thursday [Sept. 1] it had been accessed once in the previous 31 days, despite mounting speculation about its existence."

The accusations flying between Wikileaks and The Guardian continue to mount. The news organization defended its publication of the encryption key:

It's nonsense to suggest the Guardian's WikiLeaks book has compromised security in any way. Our book about WikiLeaks was published last February. It contained a password, but no details of the location of the files, and we were told it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours. It was a meaningless piece of information to anyone except the person(s) who created the database. No concerns were expressed when the book was published and if anyone at WikiLeaks had thought this compromised security they have had seven months to remove the files. That they didn't do so clearly shows the problem was not caused by the Guardian's book.