February 1, 2008

Obama’s Cool Artwork Doesn’t Seem Like a Good Sign

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mojo-photo-obamaposter3.jpgI’ve already mentioned how Obama’s got the best font of all the presidential contenders (and, thanks to an unusually lucid commenter, we now know it’s called Gotham, a typeface featured in the great little documentary Helvetica), and now he’s got some of the best posters of all time. First of all, anybody watching the Los Angeles debate between Obama and Clinton might have seen these, seemingly-homemade orange-and-black posters out front:

(photo at left from the LA Times, photo below from the NY Times)

mojo-photo-obamaposters1.jpg

No idea who made them, but a) really cool use of the stencil-shadow effect, and b) orange is a nice political color, although the last time it got a lot of use, the orange candidate got poisoned.

Designer Shepherd Fairey (of Obey Giant fame) has come up with a pretty stunning set of posters for Obama, featuring the words “progress” and “hope”:

mojo-photo-obamaposter2.gif

So, these are neat, but their neatness creeps me out a little. Putting aside for the moment the perhaps troubling issue of how the use of a politician’s face in their posters often seems to correlate with how much of a cult of personality has grown up around them, and the explicit (ironic?) references to Communist-style propaganda in Fairey’s previous work, I can find an even more basic reason for Obama supporters (like myself) to feel weird about this: candidates with cool posters never win. For example, Green Party upstart candidate Matt Gonzalez’ campaign for mayor of San Francisco was accompanied by some awesome rock-style posters, and we all know how that turned out.

mojo-photo-gonzalezposter.jpg

I know, I know, maybe a “different kind of candidate” can have a different kind of poster, but I can’t help but wonder if appropriating the monster-truck style of the Bush-Cheney campaign logo wouldn’t throw a couple percentage points Obama’s way in the general? Don’t forget, Bush certainly won the font battle in ’04:

mojo-photo-bushvskerryart.gif
(graphic by Paula Scher of the NY Times)

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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