You can go here to see more Obama mugs, along with shirts, bumper stickers, posters, and more.
Today, National Public Radio ran a segment on how difficult it will be for the White House and the government to control these kinds of products. The President-elect (and president) will actually have very little control over his image and his name.
As quoted in Wired, Marvel Comics Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada said:
"How great is that? The commander in chief to be is actually a nerd in chief," Quesada said. "It was really, really cool to see that we had a geek in the White House. We're all thrilled with that."
Obama will not be a superhero in the comic--the plot revolves around his inauguration. Still, the historic nature of his presidency gives him the aura of comic book hero--the seeming invulnerability, the way he inspires, but most importantly, the way his audiences imbue him with the characteristics of a superhero.
But like most superheroes, Obama is a reluctant one. And obviously, reality interferes with such a conception, as Obama himself would probably concur. Here's how a realistic conception of his superpowers might go: Inspires in a single speech, more powerful because of a dedicated web presence devoted to voter outreach, able to turn around the economy in six months with appropriately robust stimulus legislation--he's a Illinoisian, he's a husband and a father, he's Obama-man!
Actually, that doesn't sound bad at all, given our current situation. In any case, the Spiderman cover is just another example of the ubiquity of Obama as a sign.
I'm intrigued by the Utne Readercover this month. It features a smiling Obama, sporting sunglasses, pointing at the potential reader with the caption "Yes, You Can." For the uninitiated, Utne Reader is a progressive, self-helpish magazine that is often sold in health food stores (as well as bookstores)--it calls itself "are digests of independent ideas and alternative culture. Not right, not left, but forward thinking." Despite its self-description, its demographic is decidedly liberal.
Utne is one of more than a dozen magazines, counting those with special inauguration issues, with Obama on the cover this week. But it's the only one that makes an appeal to cool. The sunglasses and the inclusion of "You," suggests that the magazine is appealing to its progressive audience through the idea that they can be part of what Obama represents and what that represents is cool.
Marilyn DeLaure is an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of San Francisco, where she teaches classes that look at the intersection of politics, rhetoric, and consumption. Her essays have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Annual, Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement, the edited volume Confronting Consumption, and American Voices: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Orators. Here, she gives a semiotic reading of two recent magazine covers that feature Obama and past presidents.
During the week of November 24, 2008, the covers of America’s two largest news magazines depicted Barack Obama as the new incarnation of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On the Newsweek cover, Obama stands in the foreground, casting behind him a gigantic shadow in the shape of Lincoln; the accompanying article includes an image of a penny with Obama’s copper profile replacing Honest Abe’s. Time Magazine features a smiling Obama edited into the iconic black-and-white photo of FDR driving a convertible—crisp fedora, jauntily tipped cigarette holder, pince-nez glasses and all.
The Newsweek cover aesthetics are graphic and bold, with bright colors and contemporary font. In the background, Lincoln looms large, looking thoughtful but a bit gauche in his stovepipe hat. Obama, on the other hand, anchors the lower right corner, feet set in a broad stance, his head turned slightly toward Lincoln, his gaze directed up and into the bright future: he radiates part Mad Men-cool panache, part superhero masculinity. Since we read both text and images from upper left to lower right, the great Lincoln visually flows into Obama, ennobling the young president-elect. Obama-as-Lincoln underscores the oratorical eloquence of both slim men from Illinois, in particular their power to unify a divided nation.
The Time FDR-Obama cover is easily invited by the historical moment: Obama was elected amidst the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The image evokes the greatness of both men, who overcame significant obstacles to win the presidency (polio-related disability for Roosevelt, racial politics for Obama). Obama-as-FDR elicits hope that this man—optimistically flashing his pearly whites, exuding presidential strength and boundless confidence—will help us conquer “fear itself,” restore confidence in world financial markets, and perhaps even buttress a failing domestic auto industry.
Framing a candidate or president-elect as the successor to past great presidents, or claiming they share desirable character traits, is certainly nothing new. (A good example is George HW Bush’s 1992 convention film:
But I don’t recall ever seeing such explicit melding of images of a president-elect with past presidents—visually arguing that Obama literally embodies the greatness of past presidents, that he is the new Lincoln, or Roosevelt. (Another striking Obama-Lincoln melding is Ron English’s drawing (left) Can we imagine Dubya, or Bill Clinton, or Senior Bush enshrined on the nickel? But Obama’s face somehow works. It’s remarkable how Barack Obama is already being canonized as one of the great presidents, even before having taken the Oath of Office.
We were going to follow up our man of the year post with a provocative reading of Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" and its Jeff Faiery-like cover. We were one of the early readers of the Faiery posters when they started popping up around Los Angeles and here in San Francisco, and we looked forward to returning to that kind of text. But, alas, The Practice Blog beat us to it, with a smart decoding of the cover (at left).
Given the weirdness of some recent Time covers, this neo-Faiery choice is both smart and intriguing. Interesting to us is that when lauding the "person" of the year, the editors at Time chose to forgo the representational route, offering instead an image, or, more precisely, an iconic image of the president elect. One wonders if the magazine is celebrating the person or the image.
By placing the Faiery-inspired image on the cover, Timeacknowledges that this kind of fringey street image has become the putative visual marker of Obama's campaign. Also, with its roots in the WPA posters of the FDR regime, Time might also be making a semiotic connection between the kind of economic situation FDR faced and the one President-elect Obama will encounter on inauguration.
One thing is certain: the Faiery images embody the hope that many people have invested in Obama--hope that he, FDR-like, will be able to lift them out of the intellectual, economic, and political depression of the last eight years.
Barack Obama, Michael Phelps, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jon Hamm were named GQ's men of the year. According to the accompanying article, these men were chosen, because they "blew our minds." The four are among 27 men or groups of men listed.
I don't know what sort of criteria blowing a mind is, and I have to say, mind-blowing is not how I view either Hamm or DiCaprio--I think they are fine actors but just two of many.
I am more intrigued by the pairing of Obama and Phelps, both figures who achieved big things by inspiring the nation--and grinding it out.
Anyone who knows swimming knows that it's the grind-iest of sports, hours and hours in a pool, and some more doing "dry-land" work, all with the hope that endless practice will lead to greatness. Obama is no stranger to the grind, though of a different form, an endless triathlon of traveling, speaking, and meeting. The success of Obama and Phelps shows men of the year can be celebrities and those who put in the time. (And of course, win eight gold medals or become president.)
"Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else." -- Umberto Eco
About SemiObama
SemiObama is a participatory weblog that offers semiotic readings of the new visual culture surrounding Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. SemiObama looks closely at the visual representations of Obama and unpacks the various cultural, religious, national, and political icons and symbols surrounding him that are used to evoke meaning and emotional reaction. We will also write about the act of writing–decode the process of decoding–reading our own readings as a means of transparency and fuller critique.
