viz. - Barack Obama

Wild Horses and Bayonets Couldn’t Drag My Binders Full of Women Away: Political Satire on Web 2.0

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:13:58 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Inauguration officials estimate that about one million people crowded the National Mall this weekend to watch Barack Obama be sworn in as President. While this crowd was smaller than the 1.8 million who attended his first inauguration in 2008, a number of luminaries were present: Beyoncé, Stevie Wonder, and Invisible Obama. Apparently Invisible Obama had a busy day planning his inaugural ball outfit, surprising Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and acting as a “seat filler.”

In case you’re wondering who Invisible Obama is, he is a parodic Twitter feed started during the 2012 Republican National Convention. As Clint Eastwood lectured an empty chair occupied by an imaginary Obama, Invisible Obama tweeted his responses back. Over the course of this last year’s presidential campaign, a number of individuals used new media platforms to satirically comment on the election and the debate. Yet despite the fact that the election is over, however, Invisible Obama persists in commenting on political developments and other invisibility-related issues (like Lennay Kekua). As I spent two weeks of December in Boston reviewing myriad eighteenth-century political satires for my dissertation, this moment finds me thinking about satire’s evolution from the eighteenth century to our present age. New forms of media—and the new possibilities for remediation that they offer—create different opportunities for rhetors. In other words, as the 1662 Licensing Act’s lapse and evolving engraving practices enabled satire’s rise during the eighteenth century, new media platforms like Twitter and Tumblr expand satire’s spread today. However, it seems worth asking whether or not the various proliferating political memes truly function as satire. Can we compare Twitter’s Paul Ryan Gosling to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal? And what insights does the comparison provide? What kinds of political impact can satire make? And in what ways does it persist within the popular political discourse?

Image Credit: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

Eighteenth-century satire took various forms, from text and image to performance. Whereas Alexander Pope multiplied footnotes upon footnotes in his 1729 Dunciad Variorum to mock Grub Street figures like Lewis Theobald, Edmund Curll, and Eliza Haywood alongside Grub Street writing conventions, John Gay’s 1728 Beggar’s Opera turned political corruption and popular depictions of criminal life into comic melodies. The period also saw the development of a rich visual satire tradition, as caricaturists like William Hogarth, James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank satirized eighteenth-century society at large. If satire is meant to enact critique, eighteenth-century satire aimed itself at many different objects. For example, James Gillray’s 1792 print A Voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion directs its ire at the spendthrift Prince Regent, who was known for his excessive eating, drinking, and gambling.

Image Credit: The British Museum

The satire here lies in the careful background details. The feathers and candles surround what should be Prinny’s crest, which here has been changed into a fork and knife crossed across a plate. His bulging gut contrasts with his carefully curled hair and elegant fob. Dice lie on the floor as a dripping pot sits behind him, both signs of his conspicuous consumption. The print hanging on the wall depicts Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman who famously wrote The Sure and Certain Method of Attaining and Long and Healthful Life, a text reprinted multiple times during the eighteenth century. Gillray juxtaposes the two gentlemen not only to contrast the wastefulness of “prince of whales” with Cornaro’s sobriety, but also to generally indict upper-crust voluptuaries. If other satirists openly critiqued the fop and the macaroni as cultural types, Gillray took on the most famous and powerful example of them all.

Today’s satire groups around similar topics, but its different forms enable different effects. For example, the Binders Full of Women meme consists of images which sprung up on Facebook and Tumblr quickly after Romney answered a question about gendered pay inequity during the second presidential debate with a story of how he chose women for his gubernatorial cabinet from “whole binders full of women.” Like all memes, the visual requires popular cultural knowledge to interpret.

Image Credit: Binders Full of Women

This example takes a screen still from the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing and overlays on top of it a rewritten line from the film: “No one puts Baby in a corner” is now updated to “No one puts Baby in a binder.” The reinterpretation works insofar as the viewer recognizes the original context, where Patrick Swayze’s Johnny Castle shows up at the movie’s conclusion to encourage the character Baby to dance with him, and thus rebel against her family’s attempts to enforce gendered and class-based restrictions. Thus, by juxtaposing Romney’s statement with this image, the meme connects Romney with similar forces of gendered oppression.

But what are the meme’s uses? The Democratic Party quickly adopted and employed the meme to articulate arguments against many of Romney’s policy stances, co-opting the popular response for political purposes of their own. Yet commentators like Amanda Marcotte have argued that Romney’s earlier attempts to seek out qualified women for political positions are good policy, if oddly expressed. In other words, while the meme works to satirize the popular image of Romney as a patriarchal figure—and the language of restraint inherent in the word “binders”—its cultural extensions may in fact work to ridicule policies that do benefit women.

Image Credit: The Daily What

The Horses and Bayonets meme, which developed after a comment by President Obama during the last debate in which he criticized Romney’s comments on defense cuts, likewise overlays text and image to make a pointed statement. In this case, the meme gets reimagined into a Romney/Ryan slogan where Civil War re-enactors with rifles are “leading the charge” for the Republican team. The obvious Photoshopped rifles included not only suggest a link to the NRA, but also an underlying violence within the political debate.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Similarly, many satirists enacted political commentary by creating parodic Twitter accounts. Taking advantage of the first-person expressive mode of the platform, individuals as varied as Paul Ryan Gosling, Diamond Joe Biden, Bane Capital, Big Bird, Rafalca Romney, and Mexican Mitt Romney began to comment on the election both in and through the persona of political actors. As Bane Capital, playing off Rush Limbaugh’s comment that The Dark Knight Rises was attempting to smear Romney because the movie’s villain was named Bane, tweets as a pathological venture capital firm ready to “free Gotham’s people… from taxes on income above $250,000 per year,” the feed played on public perceptions about Romney’s morally-dubious business ethics. On the other side, Obama Translated juxtaposes Obama’s celebrated coolness with the popular imagination of what an angry black man would say. In the picture above, we see how Obama's anger translator Luther reads Obama's inaugural address. This feed, however, differs from many of the other Tumblr or Twitter-based satire of the election in that it is still ongoing—and created by Key & Peele, a comedy duo with a Comedy Central show.

Looking back upon the variety of political memes, it’s easier to see how they functioned and what they could do. An account like Obama Translated in part continues to have life not only because Key & Peele have branded the idea, but also because Obama remains a powerful figure. Something like Binders Full of Women may still be able to comment on sexism, but Romney’s fall means that he is no longer the most useful means through which to do so. However, perhaps the difference between something like Paul Ryan Gosling and Gulliver’s Travels has much to do with the medium. While Gulliver responded to a political moment, its method of publication provided the kind of narrative and conclusion that new media platforms don’t, without specifically building towards it (as in the case with Mayor Emanuel). It may also have to do with the status attendant the book as an object that new media has not yet had the chance to obtain—in other words, we see A Modest Proposal as something worth preserving, but not Bane Capital. Yet as I’ve read through eighteenth-century satires that attack the Duke of Newcastle’s 1750 election to Cambridge’s chancellorship, I have to work hard to reconstruct the moment. If eighteenth-century satire favors only slightly-veiled characterizations that make identification a guessing game for readers, new media satire retains all the same karotic specificity, but builds through repacking cultural products in new ways. I’ll be interesting to see what afterlives new media satire finds in the time to come.

What Obama and Romney Talked About

Jay Voss — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 14:37:00 +0000

(Image credit: New York Times)

Throughout the presidential election I was amazed how little either candidate discussed climate change – that is, neither said anything about it and both championed “clean coal,” whatever that is. Hearing the phrase “clean coal” makes me think about what it must be like for a quinquagenarian to eat Wendy’s before going in to get their blood pressure checked, and how on their drive to the doc they might shamelessly try something to mitigate the effects of their lack of restraint. What’s the humane and intelligent response to such tomfoolery? And then to think how much of that “clean coal” is powering the servers that are hosting this blog and all others out there on the interwebs…quit reading now! But of course none of us are going to quit reading or streaming, or eating Wendy’s. Hence why neither candidate thought the subject smart enough to broach, I guess.

(Image credit: Associated Press)

The word cloud pictured at the top of this post is probably old news to some of you, but it serves my point. It can be found on The New York Times website, and it’s neat because there’s a search bar at the top in which you can determine how often speakers at the two presidential nominating conventions said a given word. Neither party mentioned drones at all, and only Democrats mentioned climate change – at a rate of 0.5 times per every 25,000 words. What words did the two parties frequently mention? Democrats overwhelmingly uttered the words Medicare, women, economy, vote, health, workers, seniors, and forward. Republicans overwhelmingly mentioned the words business, leadership, freedom, better, government, and success. The parties mentioned immigration an equal number of times, which given the Hispanic turnout in the election, it’s nice to see that actions still matter more than words. Republicans surprisingly mentioned hope more often than Democrats at the 2012 conventions, and surprisingly these instances weren’t responses to Obama’s 2008 campaign theme. I’m not really sure why Democrats mentioned fight more than Republicans. But in all seriousness, taking stock of the words uttered by Democrats and Republicans at their nominating parties – the moment both teams start making their formal arguments – it should be clear why the Dems prevailed. Medicare, women, economy, vote, health, workers, seniors, and forward are all much more substantial kernels than business, leadership, freedom, better, government, and success. I would have liked to hear about the climate, however.

Staging Election Night

Jay Voss — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 15:00:00 +0000

(Image credit: Chicago Tribune)

Did anybody notice how many American flags graced the stage of Mitt Romney’s rally last week on Election Night? Why were they grouped in threes? What was the Romney campaign trying to suggest by dressing the stage in such a way? That Mitt Romney was patriotic and put America before all things? That not only is Mitt Romney patriotic, but he can afford many American flags? That like all-things American, our flags should come in large proportions? Is there anything in Mormon theology that preferences the number three? If three is somehow significant, why give us four sets of three? Maybe we got four sets of three because this way Romney could be positioned in the middle of flags during his speech? Are the three sets of gaps between the tri-flags on Mitt Romney’s Election Night stage significant? If Mitt Romney’s was supposed to stand between one of the gaps, and Paul Ryan was supposed to stand in another, does anybody know who was supposed to stand in the third gap? Does anybody know where one can buy 12 regulation-size American flags? Never mind the flags, does anybody know where one can get the flag poles that have the eagles on top?

(Image credit: Chicago Tribune)

The Obama campaign’s setup made a bit more sense. The only thing I was initially wondering about was the fact that there were high school gym bleachers behind the podium where Obama was to address the nation. And I noticed this during the Carl Rove-recall-Ohio debacle, at which point MSNBC (the station I was watching) was talking about Rove’s confusion and showing a broad shot of the Obama supporters celebrating in the Chicago convention center. From this angle, the riser at the back did look a bit out of place. Of course, when Obama came out and started speaking, from the TV angle it looked just as if he had a diverse group of people behind him, which is certainly what his campaign must have been going for. I don’t watch too many campaign speeches, or at least I like to tell myself that I don’t watch too many campaign speeches, but I’ve got to think that having bleachers in back is almost a standard of the genre. Whenever clips of such events are shown on The Daily Show or wherever else I see them, it makes complete sense that folks are standing behind a given candidate.

I wonder if the difference between the Romney and Obama campaigns here speaks to a larger point, and something that ultimately has to do with how things turned out. The Obama team was clearly aware of who their audience was (folks watching around the country on TVs), and of how their Election Night stage would come across to those tuning in. The Romney campaign apparently didn’t think of such things. Or if they did, they must have come to the conclusion that their fans wanted a certain cynical and gaudy excessiveness.

Bob Dylan's Thoughts on the Election

Jay Voss — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 15:00:00 +0000

(Image credit: Star Tribune)

Hard to know what to write about here. The regular 9 AM postings of this blog necessitate that I write a full day in advance, and I have nothing to say about the election returns, about which I’m sure is only what you wish to be reading on the morning after a general election. Sorry. But it seems like some discussion of Bob Dylan’s election predictions are worth your while, however. Two nights ago in Madison, Wisconsin, Dylan was wrapping up yet another gig on his current tour with Mark Knopfler. He’d just taken an encore break and was coming back on stage for the night’s final number. Before continuing on with the music he said, “We tried to play good tonight since the president was here today.” (Obama had earlier wrapped up a rally in Madison.) Not only this, but Dylan went on to say, “Don’t believe the media. I think it’s going to be a landslide.” Now, the obvious response is: “What does Bob Dylan know about election polls, much less the Electoral College? How could he possibly be calling this thing so early? There’s no way.” Well, I wonder if he might indeed be on to something.

(Image credit: The Guardian)

Except for the voter exit polls, which are currently taking place as voters leave the polls and thus haven’t been concluded as of writing, most of the general election’s polling has dealt with landline phone numbers. Now, when I think of the people I know with landline phones, they’re disproportionately older than 50. Asking my peers today, out of maybe 20 friends I polled on the issue, only 1 of them has a landline. So, if anything, all the polling reports in which Mitt Romney’s down by 1% or maybe even tied with Barack, well, they’re probably a bit generous to the governor. The polling companies have likely asked groups of voters naturally more predisposed to vote Republican what they’re thinking of the election, and on average Obama’s up by 1 or 2 percentage points nationally. The margin of error on these things is usually about 3%, and if the polling process is a little bit biased towards Romney, it’s not really that much of a stretch to see many (if not all) of the close states breaking Obama’s way tonight. And the major media outlets haven’t mentioned any of this in the endless quest for readership and profits. A “tight race” is good for the media outlets profit-wise, and I wonder if this economic certainty has been influencing what we’re being told to think about the election. All this, I suspect, is what Bob Dylan was getting at in his Madison comments two nights ago.

President Obama's Pink Bracelet

Jay Voss — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 03:36:39 +0000

(Image credit: The New York Times)

I noticed during the other night’s debate that President Obama is wearing a pink bracelet in support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. This is a welcomed embrace of a worthy cause, no doubt. But after Romney’s “binders full of women” in the last debate and both candidates’ rather transparent desire for female votes, I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not President Obama is actually this interested in this particular disease. The alternative would be that his wearing of the bracelet is a cynical gesture designed to cobble up some more votes. Moreover, if this were a cynical gesture on Obama’s part, what might this confirm about the ongoing political conversation in the United States? After a term in which Obama frequently supported women’s health concerns, his wearing of a bracelet is really what it takes to attract female voters? With these questions in mind, I did a little Wikipediaing a was instantly reminded that Obama’s mother died of ovarian and uterine cancer – facts I then recalled from my reading of his two books. I now felt like a jerk for my own cynicism. It was soon clear to me how much my own cynical reasoning was a product of the media-dominated culture in which I live. But what’s the alternative? Wouldn’t seeing the bracelet and not thinking twice be like watching all those negative TV ads and accepting them at face value?

(Image credit: stylebistro.com)

President Bill Clinton is the only other recent president that I’m aware of who wears a bracelet. (Despite what the previous sentence might suggest, I’m really don’t keep track of presidential jewelry – I merely Googled “presidential bracelets” and Clinton is the only other of the 44 who came up.) According to an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Clinton received the bracelet from a group of Columbian children who sing for peace against narotraffickers. The interview was conducted in 2009, and in it President Clinton says he’d been wearing the bracelet for seven years, or since 2002. So this is all since he left the White House. Thus, although it’s hard to know how Clinton met the children or the circumstances of their gift, it’s quite hard to be cynical about this Columbian bracelet. There’s absolutely no way Clinton’s wearing this thing for political advantage. Of course, someone could counter that “President Clinton’s only wearing this bracelet to project the humanitarian side of his foundation,” but the issue is of the sort that I’m not sure many people would care to argue about.

So congratulations to President Obama and his support of breast cancer. While there’s no sense in questioning his decision to wear a pink bracelet, the only alternative here is to adopt a certain naïvety about the circumstances behind his decisions. Quite the binary. I’d like to say I’m not cynical, but I’m afraid I might be too enmeshed in today’s media culture for my own good. Maybe President Obama is a model for productive naïvety? The other night’s debate featured a lot of talk about which candidate was “tougher” – at least one of them was man enough to don some pink in support of breast cancer research.

What Andy Cohen Can Tell Us About Jim Lehrer

Laura Thain — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 08:00:14 +0000

Image Source: Reality TV Gifs

I’m weighing in late this week on last week’s first presidential debate. Jay has usefully analyzed several covers of The New Yorker and illuminated for us a particular venue’s take on the candidates, while Todd has collected “Big Bird” memes to demonstrate a variety of reactions to Romney’s attack on PBS. I’d like to pick up the popular culture trail where Todd has left off and discuss one meme in particular, posted by RealityTVGifs on October 4^th, the morning after the first debate. The gif depicts presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama superimposed on Real Housewives of New Jersey Jacqueline Laurita and Teresa Giudice, respectively, while Andy Cohen, Executive VP of Bravo, moderates. How can we read the comparisons this image invites—of the presidential debate to a Real Housewives reunion special? Though there is obviously the potential of productive discussion in the relationship between Romney/President Obama and Laurita/ Guidice, what if we examine the less obvious juxtaposition: how can Andy Cohen inform our reading of moderator Jim Lehrer?

First, some context for the source of the image: the GIF was taken from the RHONJ reunion special, Season 4 Part 1 of 3. In RHONJ, as in all of the RH franchises, each season ends with a reunion, filmed after the season itself airs, in which the stars of the show comment on the previous season and respond to viewer questions. Andy Cohen, the executive face of Bravo and a producer of all of the RH iterations, hosts each reunion. Typically, Cohen takes a moderating role—that is, that he is guides the participants from sequence to sequence in one of two styles—either by asking the housewives questions directly (through which we might read Cohen as an agent for the television audience) or by selecting pre-submitted viewer questions (through which we might read the audience acting as their own agent). In a particularly fraught reunion special (or at least, one which is presented as such), Cohen often finds himself breaking up unproductive ad-hominem attacks, even ones that result in physical violence.

When asked about the altercation on his nighttime talk show Watch What Happens Live, Cohen remarked “[Teresa’s] stronger than she looks.”

Cohen seems mostly interested in preserving conversational momentum, so while he usually tolerates (and in many cases, instigates) these personal attacks, he gives them a short leash; once the possibilities of confrontation exhaust themselves, Cohen reclaims authority over the pacing and content of the narrative being produced and makes a concentrated effort to shift the focus onto a more productive subject. The parallels between Cohen’s role as “drama moderator” and Jim Lehrer’s as debate moderator are clear here: they both act as agents of a television audience whose responsibility is to facilitate a dialogue that efficiently reveals information.

And, increasingly, we can see the overlap between presidential candidates and celebrity in these debates as news outlets evaluate performance based not just on the ways in which candidates address issues but on their “personality.” But personality has two prongs here in relation to a discussion on presidential celebrity: personality as the performance of charisma and personality as the performance of intimacy. Certainly, historians trace this trend to the Kennedy/Nixon debates of 1960, but it seems to me that charisma, rather than intimacy, is the overarching criteria of such discussions. The key factor in discriminating between the cult of presidential personality and the cult of presidential celebrity, I think, is that the latter requires conflation of the public and the private—a construction that depends upon constant cultural labor in order to maintain an illusion of intimacy surrounding the political figure. We can see the relation between charisma and intimacy rather neatly performed in the clip below from the Nixon/Kennedy debates, as Nixon responds to the moderator’s question about political experience much more specifically and with arguably greater rhetorical skill than Kennedy, but lauds the virtues of non-disclosure and closed-door politics (“The president has always maintained, and very properly so, that he is entitled to get what advice he wants from his cabinet…without disclosing that to anybody!”), while Kennedy adopts a strategy of broad, direct speech by reorienting the premise of the question: “The question really is, which candidate and which party can meet the problems that the United States is going to face in the ‘60s?”.

It is in the labor of cultivating intimacy that the role of the moderator in public discourse becomes crucial. The moderator becomes an agent of the audience who has the ability to manipulate rhetorical distance to reveal or conceal information about those he is moderating. Yet he does all of this in plain sight, presenting himself as a neutral, transparent entity, not an agent himself. So go ahead and pay attention to that man behind the curtain, because he’s really one of “us”!

The comparison of Lehrer to Cohen brings to attention our assumptions about a moderator’s neutrality, in part because in the hypermediated world of The Real Housewives, our attention is constantly drawn to medium. The housewives not only engage in metadiscourse about the show itself but also discuss their treatment and participation in tabloid culture and online blogs. In addition, Cohen’s role hardly remains passive. Take, for instance, the clip below:

Real Housewives of NY "Shut Up" Montage at Reunion from Shannon Hatch on Vimeo.

As Cohen claims, the behavior of the housewives (in this case, of New York) was so egregious and that they “broke [him],” that is, that they forced him to break character or face. Why? Because, as Cohen in his frustration articulates, it is his responsibility to maintain the conversation’s productivity, which relies utterly on constantly maintaining intimacy between audience and housewife. “Shut up and let me ask about it,” “We’re going to get to it,” “Let me keep going,” “Moving on,” and his constant plea to “Let her speak” all emphasize that conventional structure—the “ask and answer” confessional—is absolutely necessary to accomplish this intimacy, while his remarks about having lunch and “getting on with it” seem to emphasize the severity of its disruption. So of course, once Cohen regains control of the reins, without skipping a beat, he looks straight into the eyes of socialite Sonja Morgan and, in utter earnestness, asks, “Sonja, tell me about Guam.”

(Cohen’s “breaking point” has become its own gif, often implemented in topical tumblrs as a means of regaining control of a conversation from an aggressive adversary:)

Image Source: Reality TV Gifs

Lehrer entered this round of presidential debates as a reluctant moderator, agreeing only to return to the hot seat after being promised that the format of the debate would differ from those of 2008. (He again, this year, claims it will be his last.) A long time contributor and advocate of public broadcasting, Lehrer on the surface couldn’t be more different than Cohen; he has long defended his exploratory, rather than pointed or aggressive, moderating style as the hallmark of enlightened debate. ““If somebody wants to be entertained,” said Lehrer after the 2000 presidential debates, “they ought to go to the circus.”

And while he might paint himself as reluctant, the media has blasted him as “the worst moderator in the history of moderation.” But, as our examination of Cohen’s moderation tactics show, Lehrer’s goal was not hypermediacy but immediacy. His support for an open debate format and his almost willingness to be talked over all serve as evidence for Lehrer’s desire to appear as a transparent mechanism in the debate proceedings. Ultimately, it seems for Lehrer, his job is done best when it is noticed least; a successful debate should appear as an intelligent conversation between the two candidates. In fact, in response to criticism of his performance, Lehrer asked, “"I was thinking, `Weren't you paying attention to what was happening before your very eyes?” (In other words, why disrupt the intimacy between the debaters and the audience by bringing attention to the moderator?) And, more significantly, Lehrer favored the new debate format, saying “I thought the format accomplished its purpose, which was to facilitate direct, extended exchanges between the candidates about issues of substance. Part of my moderator mission was to stay out of the way of the flow and I had no problems with doing so. My only real personal frustration was discovering that ninety minutes was not enough time in that more open format to cover every issue that deserved attention.”

Ultimately, Lehrer’s tactics aided Romney’s victory, which political commentators across a variety of news media outlets have attributed to the strong, in-charge demeanor he was able to portray during the 90-minute debate. But the question on many analyst’s minds now is articulated nicely by Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: “Mitt Romney’s challenge, with less than five weeks until Election Day, is to convince voters that the steady, decisive, in-command competitor who showed up for the first presidential debate is the real Mitt Romney.” I’ll be interested to see how the dynamic changes in next week’s debate, and how much moderator Candy Crowley and the town-hall format will have an effect on that change.

Mitt Romney vs. Big Bird: When Enthymemes Attack

Todd Battistelli — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Source: Unknown

In last week's debate, one of the more memorable moments was Mitt Romney's vow to cut off government funding to public television despite his appreciation of both Big Bird and Jim Lehrer. Because he would neither raise taxes nor borrow money from China, Romney argued, he would cut programs like PBS. I suppose Romney intended the statement as a bit of red meat for his base—those who would rather their tax monies not go to PBS—and perhaps also for the putative independent/undecided voter who also distrusts such government spending. I also suppose that for such audiences the line worked. However, for other audiences, Romney's enthymeme provoked an outcry, because those audiences do not share the unstated premise in his argument that PBS does not merit continued funding. Sesame Street lovers (and Romney haters) across the web responded with a torrent of photoshopped images criticizing Romney's position.

Video Credit: PBS

Of all the PBS programming to attack (in addition to Lehrer's News Hour), Romney chose one of the most beloved children's television programs in the United States. Advocates have long grown used to defending public TV in the face of threats to cut government funding. In the video above, Fred Rogers defends PBS funding before a Senate committee considering cutting the budget for public broadcasting. The American Rhetoric website offers a transcript of his testimony, where Rogers wins the support of a Senator who was previously unfamiliar with Rogers' work.

Romney may not be familiar with the Rogers story, or he may not care. At any event, he felt confident enough to declare that Big Bird would feast no more from the giant bird feeder of government funds should he win the presidency. I suspect that if Big Bird could face down an Egyptian demon and assist a lost soul on his journey through the afterlife, Romney doesn't pose too great a challenge. And if Big Bird needs any help, he can find it in the wide-spread support being expressed on image boards and blogs.

Video Credit: Sesame Street

In the spirit of Sesame Street, I'm excluding images with graphic language or imagery, though they're out there if you want to search for them. The images cover a range of arguments, from supporting President Obama or criticizing Romney to supporting PBS, and they use a range of emotional tenors from good-hearted ribbing to sharp satire to anger and sadness.

Image Credit: John Aravosis

Much like Vice President Biden's summation of the first Obama term that bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive, the above image contrasts the different "aims" of the Obama and Romney campaigns, placing bin Laden and Big Bird behind bulls-eyes.

Image Credit: everyonedienow

Image Credit: leuqarraquel

Two Kanye West memes have been repurposed for this debate. In the first, his claim that George W. Bush doesn't care about black people has been replaced with Big Bird West saying that Romney doesn't care about Big Bird. In the second, Big Bird stands in the background as West pulls away the microphones from Willard Mitt "Taylor Swift" Romney, declaring "But Big Bird is one of the best birds of all time." (I have to admit that West's more proactive moderating style might have helped the debate stay on track better than Lehrer's tepid interjections.)

Image Source: LabCoder

Other images use Sesame Street common places. In one, Big Bird informs the viewer that today is brought to us by the letter U for unemployed. In another, using a frame from an episode, he sits sadly with two children on a Sesame Street stoop holding a sign reading "Will work for food."

Image Source: johnnyhuckleberry

Image Source: cinemascapes08

The real urban streets too provide source images with Occupy Wallstreet protesters replaced with muppets from the TV show. The #occupysesamestreet meme does predate Romney's Big Bird moment, but the images seem even more relevant now.

Image Source: Unknown

Familiar Obama campaign imagery serves as the basis for others, with Big Bird appearing in Shepard Fairey's famous "Hope" poster, standing next to the red, white and blue sunrise symbol, or picking up on the campaign's "We've Got Your Back" ad.

Image Credit: Unknown

Image Credit: davonemadisonjackson

Image Credit: perpetualfrizz

PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE SPECIAL: Obama and Romney on the cover of The New Yorker

Jay Voss — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 23:08:41 +0000

With reports that Mitt Romney’s been practicing “zingers” for two months in preparation for tonight’s debate, and press releases from both campaigns attempting to temper our expectations, I can’t help but post something related to this entertainment. And though I’m dying to ask you, patriotic reader, in light of the aforementioned press releases, whether American politics has actually distended to the point where our Presidential candidates admittedly aren’t our most able communicators, I’ll keep this on the lighter side. Well, actually, one serious question real quickly: If one practices zingers for two months do they actually retain their efficacy? OK, now that I got out of my system…I’m teaching a composition class based around The New Yorker this semester, and just yesterday I had the notion that a consideration of the magazine’s recent political covers might afford a decent summation of the issues currently at stake. I don’t know if I’ll have time to do this with my class anytime soon – we’ve got articles planned through Thanksgiving – but I thought the blogosphere might find it interesting. If nothing else, it’ll be a quick refresher before tonight’s commoditized version of Enlightenment political economy (the debate will make those of us who consume it feel like engaged citizens, even though it’s obvious that both candidates are products of a slightly un-democratic fundraising process).

I’ve always been a fan of the Mitt Romney dog-on-car story. I feel sorry for the dog, of course, and shake my head at Romney’s terrible packing techniques (just because something’s been dry cleaned doesn’t mean it can’t be folded), but that we would deem the escapade this politically relevant is a reminder of how much a vibrant democracy depends upon a critical citizenry. We’re at where we’re at because of the decisions we’ve collectively made, and we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves for the hilarity of our political discourse. Accusing the other side’s voters of making things bad denies one’s own culpability in the process, and is antithetical to the project of an enlightened democracy. I think this is what the cover above is getting at. The “passenger” on top must live with the decision he’s made. One can only guess that if this cover came out after Paul Ryan was announced as Romney’s VP (on August 11^th), Ryan would be up top. This would obviously lead to another set of conclusions.

We’re likely to hear a lot about “Obamacare” tonight. However many of Romney’s criticisms will be meaningful is up for each of us to decide, especially since the structure of the overhaul is modeled on Romney’s work in Massachusetts. The issue of The New Yorker that’s pictured above came out just after the Supreme Court upheld Obama’s primary piece of domestic legislation, and it relishes the opposition’s fear that government will control their healthcare. One could also see this cover and think about the way the Obama administration forced the health care law through Congress, and thus about how Obama made politics work even after it appeared broken. Dr. Obama, Board Certified Acute Legislative Care Practitioner.

Then there’s the cover we got after Ryan was announced as Romney’s running mate. It’s quite funny, isn’t it? The fakeness of their public disposition is contrasted with all the benevolence it would actually take to make those smiles possible. They’d have to enjoy chocolate shakes out of the same glass, fix cars like folks did in the 50’s, play immature tricks on dogs. (Maybe Romney should go for a pet cat if he gets elected?) It’s the hurriedness of their shared excitement that arouses our suspicions. When at rallies and the like it’s as if they’ve just fallen in love. And this is surprising because previously Romney had painted himself as much more of a moderate Republican than the brash Ryan would ever approve of. Of course, there’s the image of Congressman Ryan reading to Romney in bed. Ryan’s reading Atlas Shrugged, and Romney’s out cold. Maybe it’s this dissonance that they want to smile over.

And then there’s this past week’s cover, which is surely a response to the Mother Jones 47% video. It’s preposterous – Romney’s taking a backseat ride on a horse while his butler attempts to jump the Potomac. The casualness with which Romney embraces what would otherwise be a huge leap for the average commuter is in line with the Mother Jones video’s aftertaste. He’s out of touch. Riding a horse is good exercise, and he’s having someone do it for him. Not only is someone doing it for him, but Mitt’s nonchalantly reading what’s likely to be The Wall Street Journal all the while. The first two historical figures I can think off the top of my head of who preferred white horses are Julius Caesar and Napoleon. Do with that what you will.

So there you have it. Tonight you can look for Obama to deride Romney’s decision process and elitism as he celebrates his major policy achievements, and look for Romney to talk about how Obamacare’s going to raise our taxes. Get out the popcorn – it might be better than whatever sitcoms people are watching these days. The ratings will probably be higher, anyways. If democracy is anything more than a commodity, we should spend tonight engaged in our local politics: these will most certainly have more of an impact on our immediate situations, and the world in which our children grow up in.

Logos Isn't Working

Jay Voss — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: storyful.com

So last week I suggested that my post on tennis, David Foster Wallace, and postmodernism might be my last for the 2011–2012 academic year. I lied. Here’s another 500–1,000 words for your delectation. While thinking over what to write about last week, I decided to take coffee at Starbucks and read the paper. This was the day that Paul Krugman wrote his column “The Amnesia Candidate” (22 April 2012), and I’ve been thinking about what’s said there ever since. The Op-Ed is a thoughtful evaluation of Mitt Romney’s most recent campaign rhetoric, and it is especially efficient in the way it attacks the former governor for blaming some of Bush’s legacy on Obama. While Krugman does concede that Obama could have handled economic matters differently, he ultimately concludes by asking “Are the American people forgetful enough for Romney’s attack to work?”. This is a complex question. You hear cynics complain all the time that American voters have a 6-month attention span, which, if true, must surely be further compromised by consumer culture’s narcotization. There’s probably some truth to this. How could there not be given technology’s onslaught of information?

Krugman’s point isn’t so much a question of whether or not voters can recall that Romney’s speech was given in a drywall warehouse which was shut down during the Bush years – to suggest as much is to blame the average American voter for not having the mind of a Princeton professor, which would be ignorant. “Work” here, it seems to me, is a question or whether or not Romney can emotionally engage his base. The more that Americans are thinking critically about their environment, the more likely they are to realize (not remember) that the president has very little to do with the economy. All of this puts into relief the image Romney was trying to project, and it might be a good measure of the state of U.S. political discourse circa 2012.

A little research suggested that Romney’s entire speech at the drywall factory was part of his new advertising aesthetic: “Obama Isn’t Working.” I found a new TV ad (above) that introduces this notion. Romney’s campaign cites a number of statistics in the ad that try to portray North Carolina’s employment situation in a bad way. As those of you who have watched the youtube clip above have surely noted by now, the TV ad has the feeling of a movie trailer for the latest action flick. Why Romney wants to suggest that 2012’s Democratic National Convention is going to be such an action-packed event is beyond me. (Maybe it’s a sign that large portions of his campaign staff didn’t watch the 2008 Democratic National Convention? And I ask this with all due respect: Grecian columns notwithstanding, the 2008 Democratic National Convention was a far cry from The Avengers.) Perhaps the slogan “Obama Isn’t Working” is meant to suggest that 44 isn’t going to work everyday? Maybe Romney’s implying that Obama’s reclining on the couch with professional football and a bag of pretzels?

Sorry if anybody out there is a Romney fan. I’ll get back to sports and postmodernism next time, I promise. The point here isn’t that I think other’s political imperatives are less important than my own, nor do I wish to imply that Obama’s practicing a rhetoric that would make Hugh Blair proud. What’s striking to me about Romney’s new advertising campaign, however, is how little it relies on logical arguments. (And again, I suspect this would probably hold true for a number of prominent Democrat politicians.) What clearly matters most these days is pathetic appeal. I suspect that the hour plus many working Americans spending commuting to and from work every day doesn’t make them happy people (the geometric variety of brake lights can only entertain for so long), and the longer that these folks are unhappy in a bubble with only a radio to kill the time, the more susceptible they’ll be to emotional rhetoric. This is all economics really – the more charged up one’s base is, the better – and I’m not sure anyone’s to blame for a systemic crisis.

That said, America was designed in a period that prized reason and logic.

I Turn My Camera On, Then My Photoshop

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 05:51:58 +0000

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

H/T: Crushable

While I’ve done some recent fangirling over Ryan Gosling and Benjamin Franklin, I would have never imagined I could be in a photograph with them. At least, not until I saw Everett Hiller’s holiday party photographs, into which he Photoshopped various celebrities.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

According to Hiller, “Every year my wife and I throw a party and when I send out the photos I add famous people.” The results are extremely entertaining and include some amazing guests: everyone from The Rock and Tom Cruise to George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

Hiller’s photographs represent an unusual extension of the kind of fan culture in which Gosling, Whitney Houston, and I Made America participate. While the joke lies in the juxtaposition of major Hollywood celebrities with the homely setting, these recontextualizations act like fan fiction. For example, if Shia LaBeouf is known for his alcohol-fueled antics, placing a bleary-eyed picture of him next to a smirking man builds new stories from established canon. Having an impeccably besuited Neal Patrick Harris amidst drunken revelers winks at his How I Met Your Mother character Barney Stinson, who always takes perfect photographs. Positioning Ryan Gosling among everyday partygoers expands on established Gosling meme fanon, in which Gosling is happy to talk feminism and typography with you.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

However, these kinds of images also build or serve to make arguments about the nature of the celebrities included. For example, many Republicans accused Obama in 2008 of being a “celebrity” who was out-of-touch with Americans because he was “worr[ied] about the price of arugula”—and they’re still making that argument today. The above image, which integrates Obama in the middle of a middle-class (and otherwise white) party, visually argues that Obama is a Regular Joe who exists on the same level as his fellow citizens. The surprise of the guy in the green hat behind him even naturalizes him into the setting insofar as it would probably be a huge shock for most of us to meet Obama in some guy’s living room.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

Outside of a political context, however, picturing Tom Cruise cackling while posed on a piñata reinforces the narrative of Cruise as a crazed Scientologist, a narrative that has been used to criticize Scientology’s practices. These photographs work based on an idea of celebrity that is simultaneously near and far: celebrities are both just like us and stand out in the crowd. Hiller’s Photoshopping makes the famous blend in naturally and unnoticeably with their surroundings but also invites viewers to play a game of Where’s Waldo, looking to see how many late-night comedians stand in the background. As Joseph Roach defines celebrity as the possession of “it” or “the arresting, charismatic power of celebrities,” these photographs arrest the celebrities within a visual frame and encourage the viewers to sympathetically merge themselves with them.

Image Credit: Newsweek

This seems like a pretty benign use of Photoshopping technology; however, the placement (and displacement, in the case of Hillary Clinton) of celebrities in new contexts can have the power to shock and disgust. The above image created by Newsweek to grace their magazine cover drew outrage from those who thought Tina Brown was tasteless to put a dead Princess Diana next to the daughter-in-law she will never know. The accompany story, which imagines how Diana might have been at 50, is a kind of fanfiction, but the picture’s power meant that more people focused on it. What we can see from this is that while anybody with the money can create any sort of fictionalized image, Photoshop’s rhetoric is governed by decorum. Using the technology to make funny pictures is fine, but it’s not allowed to pervert truth—probably because it’s so easy to do just that. If perception is reality, Photoshop is a powerful actor in the war of words—and a valuable tool for retooling actors.

The City upon a Hill at Halftime: Detroit, Unions, and the USA

Rachel Schneider — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:43:30 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

While baseball is more my sport, I haven’t missed watching the Super Bowl for the last couple of years. If nothing else, I enjoy analyzing the Super Bowl commercials—and this year’s Chrysler commercial featuring Clint Eastwood presents an irresistible opportunity to discuss some interesting controversies. Both conservative critics like Karl Rove and the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Goldstein and liberal ones like Michael Moore and Charles Mudede have read the commercial as promoting Obama’s reelection campaign. The ad’s copy and visuals directly connect the fates of Detroit and the auto industry with larger economic and political trends, as you can see:

One of the commercial’s early phrases, “It’s halftime in America,” sounds very similar to the phrase from Reagan’s famous ad, “It’s morning again in America.” However, the commercial’s tone is not nearly as triumphal. While both ads feature morning scenes, Chrysler’s surrounds theirs with images of a grizzled Clint Eastwood walking down a dark alley, his face only visible at the commercial’s end. The bright daylight surrounding a man sitting on the edge of his bed is juxtaposed with a commentary track that declares, “People are out of work and they’re hurting, and they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback.” The commercial attempts to play on the kairos of both the Super Bowl halftime and America’s economic recovery. And while the Giants and Eli Manning managed to come back after the football game resumed, I want to think about how both the commercial and the conversation surrounding it think through the “comebacks” of Detroit and the American automotive industry at large.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The Chrysler ad’s argument invites America, in the midst of economic crisis, to look to Detroit and companies like Chrysler for inspiration. The commercial’s copy makes the argument explicit:

The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together. Now Motor City is fighting again. I’ve seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life, times when we didn’t understand each other. It seems that we’ve lost our heart at times. The fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead. But after those trials, we all rallied around what was right and acted as one, because that’s what we do. We find a way through tough times—and if we can’t find a way, then we make one. All that matters know is what’s ahead: how do we come from behind? How do we come together, and how do we win? Detroit’s showing us it can be done. And what’s true about them is true about all of us.

The visuals double the words: instead of a waving American flag, we see a flag for the city of Detroit. The images of happy industry are those of African-American men in a plant, wearing safety goggles and manufacturing shiny cars. At the commercial’s end, we see all of the people who were getting ready for the day now relying on Chrysler cars to transport wood to construction sites or children to school.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

While both Eastwood himself and Chrysler’s marketing chief Olivier Francois have explicitly denied that the commercial promotes Obama, the copy and accompanying video do implicitly argue that Detroit’s rebirth—enabled by the auto industry bailout—presents a good model for the rest of the country. The warmly-lit unionized auto plants are directly contrasted with images of television news talking heads and protesting Wisconsin union members, in which cold colors predominate. Even the black-and-white pictures of families and firemen visually set these people apart from the others, turning them into models for the rest of us. Detroit thus takes from the rest of America its role as “the city upon a hill.” It is the reborn economy that America can follow, through the purchase and support of American labor and American-built cars.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

However, this message contrasts strongly with common images of Detroit as a ruined and ruin-city, and conservatives are reacting strongly against it. Clint Eastwood, the paragon of a rugged, silent conservative American masculinity, is now being attacked as “a spokesman for welfare queen Chrysler.” While Chrysler’s slogan, “imported from Detroit,” attempts to play with the stereotype that imported cars like Toyota and Honda are superior, some commentators are reading it as “the signature Obama haughtiness” which prefers a European socialism to American capitalism. In a political moment where Republicans reject unions as anti-American (despite a long history to the contrary), this commercial directly challenges these scripts.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

It’s interesting to contrast this year’s commercial with the 2011 Chrysler Super Bowl commercial featuring Eminem, which also embraced this slogan, incorporated some of the same images of Detroit’s ruin, and also boldly proclaimed Detroit’s identity as “the Motor City” where “this is what we do.”

The important difference here, I speculate, is that the older commercial merely tries to reverse an association between Detroit and cheap cars—pairing the language of “luxury” with images of grand old Detroit buildings—this year’s commercial dares to proclaim Detroit more than just “a town that’s been to hell and back,” but a model for America’s future progress. The language of American exceptionalism is frequently and commonly invoked in advertisements, but what makes American exceptional and what parts of America can be exceptional or “American” is always heavily negotiated and contested during an election year. This commercial and its connected visuals (like the map on YouTube which shows people watching the ad across the country, drawing lines of connection between the viewer and the USA) argue powerfully for “the values we hold in Detroit … and the values we think our customers identify with,” but those values implicit can’t be uncritically accepted during an election year when Republicans are campaigning against a President they call “almost un-American.” Likewise, a commercial that seeks to conflate the “they” of Detroit with the “we” of America can’t be accepted by politicians who explicitly rejected the auto industry bailout. This commercial—unintentionally or not—signals the beginning of not just the Super Bowl’s second half, but also the contentious election season ahead.

Let’s Stay Together, America: Obama’s Viral Campaigns

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:25:28 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

While ostensibly Tuesday’s State of the Union address was President Obama’s most important speech of the week, his performance at an Apollo Theater fundraiser last Thursday stole the spotlight. The reason for this, of course, was because he sang a few bars from Al Green’s classic song “Let’s Stay Together.”

While Obama’s presidency thus far has not avoided criticism, his singing seems to have garnered him praise from far and wide. Many individuals—from one linker at BuzzFeed who commented on “Barack’s sick falsetto!” to Reverend Green himself, who thought that Obama “nailed it”—enjoyed seeing their very serious President sound a softer note. A search on Twitter for “Obama Al Green” pulls up a number of results, including tweets like these:

Image Credit: Screenshot from Twitter

Indeed, if tweets like LeVar Burton’s can be taken as general, Obama’s tune seduced an audience beyond the screaming supporters at the fundraiser. The choice of song, which Obama chalked up to Rev. Green being in the audience, might have been intention—a parallel can easily be drawn between the song’s narrative and Obama’s situation. Like the singer of “Let’s Stay Together,” Obama is attempting to retain the affections of a lover ready to leave. If Obama’s popularity decreased over the last few years, he’d like his union with America to last “whether / Times are good or bad, happy or sad.” What might be different between now and 2008—among many things—is that here Obama actually is making his own viral video instead of being the subject of them. Back in 2008 on this blog Jillian Sayre noted the numerous songs and videos posted online about Obama and concluded that “Obama's participatory rhetoric seems to elicit a creative response that belies an identification (perhaps over-identification) with the candidate.”

The Atlantic writer Ta-Naheisi Coates comes to a similar conclusion in his post on Obama’s relationship with the black community. And while some elements of this moment—like the Apollo Theater, the reference to the Sandman, and the choice of Al Green—might strike African-American voters in a particular way, Coates notes that the desire to turn Obama into a symbol is shared by all:

One way to think about this is remember that black people are people, and that all people turn human beings into symbols, whatever the person's actions. It's worth thinking about why we -- as humans -- do this. What need are we fulfilling? What ache are we ministering to? What is this need -- among us all -- to represent for our team?

Obama’s musical moment is an intentional appeal, but we the people are the audience who makes it viral. (In fact, audiences read texts looking for Obama, as when Gawker suggested Obama was in the Tag Team's 1993 video for "Whoomp (There It Is)") What is it about this President Obama that makes us want to vote for him, or put him in musical viral videos? Is this his equivalent of the prior President’s Bushisms? One difference between Bush and Obama, however, is that Bush never inspired anything like the Obama Girl or caused anyone to Tweet anything like: "Watched Obama sing Al Green. I'm pregnant now." Obama, more so than any other modern President (with the possible exception of Bill Clinton) is subject to objectification (like when paparazzi photographed him shirtless in Hawaii). I'm not sure if this is a result of his participatory rhetoric, which encourages identification, or whether the public is turning Obama into yet another symbol of something we need. This, at least, seems far more benign than Republicans turning him into a communist Muslim.

Fox News, Obama, Osama, and the Analysis of Gaffes

Michael Widner — Tue, 03 May 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Screenshot of FoxNews.com via Salon

After the stunning news that Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, the news outlets are scrambling for different things to say about the event and its coverage. One meme that has begun cropping up fits with the existing narrative about the Republican bias of Fox News. For instance, Salon displayed the screenshot of the Fox website under the headline, "Fox News congratulates Bush for bin Laden".

Natasha Lennard notes that the Fox site featured an image of President Bush, but none of Obama. While I think the images in this screenshot don't go quite as far as Lennard claims, they certainly demonstrate the importance of visual rhetoric and a careful attention to what images an individual or organization chooses to foreground. We could easily call this screenshot a visual gaffe.

Indeed, sites across the Internet are constructing a narrative about Fox News that implies not only conservative bias, but a subconscious equation of Obama with Osama. A typo in the news scroll for a local Fox affiliate is receiving the most attention:

Image via The Huffington Post

Holding up Fox for ridicule while imputing a conscious (or perhaps subconscious) maliciousness to the mistake, a HuffPo writer snarkily remarks, "You know, we had almost forgotten how similar the names of our commander-in-chief and our #1 enemy happen to be. Thank you, Fox, for providing us with this helpful reminder!" An update to the original post links to another gaffe, this time verbal rather than visual. There's even a video on YouTube in which Fox reporter Geraldo Rivera claims "Obama is dead" before correcting himself.

The narrative these images allow Salon and HuffPo to advance is that not only is Fox News a biased media outlet promoting conservative views, but also that hatred of Obama runs so deeply there that it comes out as Freudian slips and subtle choices about page layout. Of course, while several of these mistakes appear on local affiliates, not the cable network channel, the fact that Fox News has provided a place for discussions such as the one featured below make such narratives easily believable to many people:

Image via BuzzFeed

One blogger, for example, calls Fox News a "horrible disgrace" based, it seems, entirely upon the Fox 40 mistaken news ticker. Fox 40, for its part, provided more a rebuttal than an apology in which it noted the ease with which typos can crop up while substantiating its claims with screenshots from 2 different ABC sites:

Screenshots via Fox40.com

Since, however, there's no existing narrative about ABC's bias, I suspect we won't see their mistakes or those from any other networks making the rounds nearly as regularly as the Fox News gaffes (except on Failblog).

What I find particularly interesting about these intepretations is that they show visual analysis "in the wild" so to speak, the importance of ethos to interpretation, and the way images taken almost entirely out of context can provide such apparently persuasive support to banal conspiracy theories. These arguments assume that everything we see from a news outlet (particularly one with a reputation like Fox's) is indicative of central control and deep antipathy towards President Obama. The images thus reinforce and perpetuate a narrative even though human error can far more easily account for the mistakes.

The First Photo Album

Andi — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:26:19 +0000

Photo Credit: Anthony Almeida

"The First Marriage" by Jodi Kandor, The New York Times Magazine

Last Sunday the New York Times Magazine ran an extended piece on Barack and Michelle Obama's relationship titled, "The First Marriage." The article examines the couple's negotiation of their private relationship in the public eye and considers how the presidential couple and the presidential family are expected to conform to a set of proscribed roles and the ways in which the Obamas are challenging those norms. Accompanying the article is an extended photo-essay culled from several moments since the Obamas married in 1992. The images are arrayed in chronological order--many are candid snapshots of the first family at milestone moments on "the road to the White House" and are captioned accordingly. This photo-essay that mimics the form of a family photo-album provides an opportunity for thinking through the intersections of photography and the family, of the private and public, of marriage and politics.

Both the text of this article and the images consider the public nature of a presidential relationship and the branding of the Obamas as a couple. The image on the cover of the magazine (above) suggests that the viewer has access to a behind-the-scenes look at the couple as they gaze at each other (oblivious to the viewer's gaze) and wander off stage and toward the camera after a public event. The photograph that begins the article, however, includes at its center an image of the embracing Obamas displayed on a massive television screen flanked by several large advertisements and looked upon by a large crowd. Here we have both the private voyeuristic look into their marriage that the article promises along with the recognition that this is a relationship that exists in the broader public sphere.

Today at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association I attended a panel titled "The Cool of Barack Obama" at which Nghana Lewis presented a paper considering the ways in which Barack and Michelle Obama redefine and represent black love. Lewis placed Barack and Michelle Obama within a long trajectory of representations of black heterosexual relationships arguing that the Obamas both work within and challenge cultural representations of black love. Although Lewis did not explicitly consider Jodi Kandor's recent piece in the New York Times Magazine, many of her arguments might easily extend to this First Family Photo Album. Marianne Hirsch argues that the family photo-album is a collection of choreographed and staged images that "position family members in relation to one another and to the 'familial gaze'--the conventions and ideologies through which [members] see themselves" (Hirsch, The Familial Gaze). Certainly we can see Barack, Michelle, Sasha, Malia positioned in relation to one another in ways that both uphold and undermine normative representations of the American family. How, then, does this First Family Album position us in relation to the First Family? How do these images of the First Family suggest that we should construct our own families?

Fallen Soldiers

timturner — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:52:02 +0000

At his first televised press conference last week, President Obama received a question about a controversy that, though once debated quite energetically, had seemed for a time to recede into the background as the casualty rate for U.S. soldiers has fallen. The questioner wanted to know whether the new administration would order the Pentagon to reverse its policy of forbidding the publication of photographs showing the return of fallen soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (President Obama responded by not commenting, since the policy is currently "under review.")Image credit: thememoryhole.org, via Associated Press, NYT, 2/15/2009

The question, and the issue, were covered yesterday by The New York Times in a story and an editorial urging the President to overturn the policy. As the author of the former summarizes the issue, "Part of the debate that has developed turns on whether the return of soldiers is a private or public matter. While families have registered a range of opinions about allowing the news media at Dover, many have maintained that the return of a body is so deeply personal that they should be able to decide whether to keep it private." Above and beyond the questions raised by the difficult question of how to treat the images of what is essentially both a public and a private sacrifice (a soldier dying for his or her country is also lost to his or her family), the debate itself is simply a reminder of the power of images to move arguments.

Remote Sensing and the Obama Inauguration

Nate Kreuter — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:35:03 +0000

Much was made of the crowds that attended President Obama's inauguration in Washington, DC last week.

As evidence of remote sensing's (that is, satellite image's) greater role in public consciousness, check out this image of the crowds gathered for the historic moment, shot at one-half meter resolution. (One-half, or.5, meter resolution means, more or less, that the smallest units discernible in the image are .5 x .5 meters, about the size of a person from above. The resolution is roughly equivalent on the NIIRS scale, which is the military/intelligence community's rating scale for remotely sensed image interpretability.)

Increasingly news organizations are citing remotely sensed images in their reporting. Whether this is a techno-fad or provides a legitimately new and informative perspective on events, I'd be curious to hear readers' opinions on.

Image courtesy of GeoEye (click link for a larger resolution photo, as well as additional remotely sensed images)

The New whitehouse.gov

timturner — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:22:42 +0000

By now this is slightly old news, but in keeping with the previous post on Presidential photography, and because I thought it merited a mention here, I hope everyone has had a chance to check out the newly redesigned whitehouse.gov website:

Since President Obama's campaign had a reputation for design and branding savvy (much discussed on viz.), it's worth noting that the new website is similarly stylish and sleek: not surprising for a man hailed by some as the first "Digital President." Notably, the site retains layout and design elements similar to barackobama.com. Although so far there is no "Contribute Now" button, there is a form at the top of the home page where you can sign up for email updates. The main banner includes rotating photographs and "news" updates. There is also a new feature for the White House web site: a blog. In addition to all this, there is a fairly extensive "Agenda" page, much of the content of which seems to come straight from the "Issues" page of the campaign website.

All of this is in keeping with the usual hybrid function of the White House website to serve as campaign tool (never to early to start thinking about 2012), information portal, and cog in the message machine. But this design in particular seems to aim at a couple of President Obama's stated ambitions: to get people more involved in government and to open the workings of the executive branch to more transparency. It's interesting to think about how (and whether) this redesigned website helps achieve these aims. If I were teaching in rhetoric this semester, I would certainly consider designing an assignment around these questions.

Still getting used to it

Sarah Wagner — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 02:56:24 +0000

Waiting in the HEB checkout line, I stared at magazines like these lined up above the conveyor belt:

As I stood there, thinking about the messages the covers were putting out there (fatherhood, get-to-know-your-new-president), I saw the second layer of the argument. Again, as happened the day after the election, it sunk in: A Black family will be moving into the White House. We have a Black President. I think the raw, everydayness of the pictures in pop magazines made it even more powerful--President Barack Obama is now an everyday thing, about to become old news as all news does these days.

Holy Man*

Sarah Wagner — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 19:41:45 +0000

So earlier this week, I'm checking my news online and I come across this photo of Barack Obama:

I immediately flagged it and sent it off to some friends and family. "What a smart photographer," said my sister Karin. It's not often that photographers get a chance to document a mundane event while also documenting the metaconversation happening across the country. Not only does Obama look like he has a halo around his head and torso, but the photo (at least online) is so flat it looks like a 15th-century painting. If he had had two fingers raised rather than one, I'd have titled this entry "The Second Coming".

(*Read this title two ways: put the stress on 'holy' and it describes the effect of the picture; put the stress on 'man'--holy man--and you get an a propos exclamation!)

Satire?

timturner — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:07:56 +0000

The recent New Yorker cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama in radical drag, as it were, hasn't been discussed here on viz. It deserves a mention, since the nature and definition of satire has been discussed on the site before.

In my opinion, it fails utterly as satire. First of all, anytime anything requires extensive explanation AS SATIRE, it probably isn't the most adept or polished attempt. This week's New York Times "Week in Review" piece, written by Lee Siegel, agrees. In it, Siegel concludes that "By presenting a mad or contemptible partisan sentiment as a mainstream one, by accurately reproducing it and by neglecting to position the target of a slur — the Obamas — in relation to the producers of the slur, The New Yorker seems to have unwittingly reiterated the misconception it meant to lampoon."

I agree, and not because I think the Obamas are off-limits as targets for satire, or that they themselves think they are off-limits (a conclusion I've heard on cable news from some on the "lunatic fringe" Siegel mentions). To me, the so-called satire of the piece fails because, rather than seeming to satirize the intellectual laziness, the total divorce from reality, required to hold the views depicted here, it seems to satirize the Obamas themselves for producing those views, instead of those who maintain and perpetuate them. The message is confused, the execution, confusing. Grade: F.

Appropriating Obama imagery

John Jones — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:27:50 +0000

The distinctive visual style of the Obama campaign has prompted a number of visual responses, as critics have appropriated this style in order to challenge the Senator’s policies and behaviors.

Below I’ve posted some examples of images that are critical of Obama, yet derived from campaign posters. I’ve placed some original Obama posters to the left of the copies for comparison purposes. You can click on individual posters for linkbacks to the sources where I found them.

Recently, a number of Obama supporters have become disenchanted with his change of heart on the FISA legislation, particularly the way in which this move makes the senator’s rhetoric about hope and change appear to be mere political calculation.

The poster on the right is a reference to what critics have described as Obama’s “elitism.”

This interesting poster criticizes the Obama campaign for using a poster style associated with revolutionaries like Che Guevara.

Finally, this poster criticizes the rhetoric of the campaign, insinuating that it is built on buzzwords and lacks ideas.

Framing and defaming

timturner — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:48:50 +0000

Last night while watching Barack Obama give his speech after the Pennsylvania primary, I got all excited about posting something on viz. for general amusement. But then when I read some other blogs, I realized I was not the only person to see what I saw. I forgot that in this Golden Age of the Internets, Original Ideas do not stay that way for long. But behold, anyway:Notice the three dudes in Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirts right behind the Senator. Supposedly the campaigns choose the people in those seats pretty carefully; one has to wonder, if in fact that's true, what was going through the head of the person who made this decision. Not that there's anything wrong with Abercrombie (well, Jezebel says it's "the epitome of everything about the America that is not 'ready' for" a President Obama), but still, it seems like a weird choice, no?

Visual dismissal?

erinhurt — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 23:12:08 +0000

I ran across an interesting blog on Lens Culture that argues that a recent French magazine cover (posted below) equates Obama to a young, inexperienced boy.

Blogger Jim Casper writes:

This magazine is currently on the racks at news stands all over Paris, and the cover image has become one of those giant back-lit advertisements that blare from the outsides of kiosks on the streets, and ads at bus stops, and posters lining the hallways of the metro stations.

To me, it is the lowest form of pandering to prejudice. To me, it implies: "What do we get after Bush? Do you want an inexperienced cute young black kid running the US?" Of course, they never have to say this explicitily in words. Photographs and headlines can do volumes of damage all on their own. However, except for one tiny quote by Obama buried at the bottom of an inside page, the article presents policy sound bites by Clinton and McCain only, as if they are the only candidates worth listening to. Obama is dissed and dismissed with a visual racial slur.

I'm not sure that I would go so far as to call this a visual racial slur, though I do agree that the title dismisses Obama visually. While I don't have access to the article, from the blog's commentary the article itself is equally dismissive.

Rock the Vote

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:02:39 +0000

Obama supporters have been called fanatical and naive but something that we've also noticed is that they are also rather musical. MK noted the Will.I.Am video and McCain parody here and Tim posted the somewhat...let's say cheesy...response from Clinton supporters here. Starting with the "Obama girl"'s song (who, it turned out later, didn't vote), and helped along by the accessibility of web publishing, Obama's participatory rhetoric seems to elicit a creative response that belies an identification (perhaps over-identification) with the candidate.

Here in Texas we've got two new videos hitting the tubes. The first attempt to argue against the widely held conception that Clinton is the candidate for Latino (and in this case Mexican American) voters:

The corrido emphasizes Obama's humble roots, flashes pictures of him in crowds of people, and argues "his fight is our fight."

The second, recently composed by Austin singer Kat Edmonson:

The video asks the question "What would you do if you were president?" and flashes to different people holding their answers in the form of cardboard signs. What intrigues me about the Will.I.Am video and these two latest incarnations is the various ways that they argue an identification with Obama, in the "we" "our" and (notably missing) "I" that signifies a corporate or cooperative identity.
It makes me think of the larger ideas of collaborative composition that inhere to ideas of New Media and Web 2.0 and I think it is interesting to consider how this "new idea" for politics that people attach to Obama might be a larger "new idea" of culture.

Visual rhetoric on the campaign trail

John Jones — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:24:33 +0000

As the Democratic primaries have continued on throughout the winter, columnists and pundits have been reaching out to find ever more ways of distinguishing between Obama and Clinton. Salon has posted an article analyzing the design of the candidate’s logos, while Clay Spinuzzi has blogged on the contrasting designs of Obama and Clinton campaign flyers being distributed in Texas (without any images, unfortunately).

In both cases, Obama is declared the temporary winner. According to Karrie Jacobs in Salon

Of the current campaigns, Barack Obama’s is the best at getting his message across through graphics—think of all those “Change we can believe in” signs—and most careful observers see his as the first sophisticated corporate-style identity to emerge from presidential politics. While the Bush-Cheney W was, in Froelich’s words, “cold,” Obama's symbol is the opposite, literally and figuratively sunny. While the W was crude, Obama’s mark is smooth.

Spinuzzi claims that Obama’s flyer seems more detailed, noting that

the Obama flyer appears customized for Texas from the ground up, while the Clinton flyer seems more generic.

While politics have always depended in some way on visuals for their persuasiveness, it is refreshing that this visual persuasion is getting this kind of attention from the media.

Michelle Obama’s halo

John Jones — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:30:59 +0000

Timothy Noah at Slate has been keeping an eye out for evidence that Barack Obama is, in fact, the Son of God. In his latest post, he linked to this picture of Michelle Obama from Reuters:

According to Noah, the framing and Obama’s posture suggest a passing resemblance to this woman:

Despite how Ms. Obama photographs, according to Noah, she keeps her husband down to earth.

In the Feb. 13 Financial Times, Edward Luce suggests that the candidate's Sancha Panza of a wife, Michelle Obama, keeps her man from developing a Messiah complex, and scolds this column for not recognizing that. Actually, I never suggested Obama had a Messiah complex (though others have). I merely suggested that a few excitable souls in the media bear the apparant conviction that Obama is the Redeemer.

Sheep’s clothing

John Jones — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:12:32 +0000

Barack Obama has taken some heat for remarks made to a New York Post reporter attacking Al Sharpton (who’s had a lot to deal with lately, thank you very much) which pundits are arguing were made by an Obama operative. Now there’s this:

source: YouTube, by: ParkRidge47

This hatchet-job on Hillary Clinton, which incorporates footage from Ridley Scott’s striking Super Bowl ad for Apple, is now making its way around YouTube in various guises. Significantly, it ends with a plug for Obama; once again, it seems, Obama’s thugs are on the prowl, taking shots at anyone who would threaten his rise to world supremacy. Whether or not this characterization represents the reality of the situation—apparently the identity of the video’s creator has yet to be established, and the Obama camp has distanced themselves from it—it is clear that the creator of the video is bashing Hillary and providing Obama as an alternative.

With that fact in mind, I’ve yet to see anyone analyze the content of the video to see if this Obama’s-operatives-theory makes sense. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the user who posted the video claims that s/he did so in response to “Hollywood entertainment mogul David Geffen's public critique of Clinton—and ‘Clinton's campaign bullying of donors and political operatives’ in the wake of it.” This explanation would be believable enough if it weren’t for the Obama plug at the end. The association with Obama smears him by implying that he is smearing Hillary. Does this seem like a logical move for an Obama-supporter to make?

More telling is the actual argument of the video. By making the association with 1984, the video presents the senator from New York as a Big-Brother-like figure, one who is interested in socializing American culture, if not in the actual spoken text (“people who want to be part of a team, the American team”), than at least by implication. This isn’t a liberal argument against Clinton; it’s a conservative one.

So, either the creator of the ad 1) is pro-Obama, but was ignorant of the video’s rhetorical effect, or 2) the ad was created as an attack on both Hillary and Obama. I vote for 2.

That aside, I like the stylish "O" at the end of the video, fashioned after the old, rainbow-colored Apple logo. While the leaf is a bit distracting—it reminds me of “Ó,” the wrong letter—I enjoy the thick line of the “O” and its perfect circularity. Obama should definitely adopt it for his website. In my opinion, it is far superior to the Bank of America-esque logo he’s using now.

Update: Apparently on today’s episode of Good Morning America, the above argument is mentioned. Some have taken this to be evidence of big-media spin. Unfortunately, since I am not a member of the media, big or otherwise, anyone who wants to take a shot at this blog entry will have to do so by attacking my argument, not my ethos.