Harm

February 27th, 2008Blog0 comments

It’s difficult to measure how much the Hillary4U&Me video has hurt her. It’s so painfully lame that some believe that the Obama camp put it together to undermine her. Turns out it’s real (See NY Times piece here) — created by a tech CEO with good intentions but little else.

It’s like what Obama said about Louis Farrakhan in the debate last night: You can’t choose who endorses you. With friends like these, right?

What’s amusing is that in the same way Hillary’s handlers can’t understand why they’re losing, the guy who created Hillary4U&Me can’t understand why the song sucks.

It sucks in the same way socks suck as a Christmas present. On a rational level, giving someone a pair of socks seems like a good idea. Hey, they’re useful right? Who doesn’t need socks?

But on an emotional level, socks represent the least thoughtful, least inspired, and least exciting gift a person could get. Just like Hillary4U&Me, from its title with a number in it to its solid gold sound lifted from a 90s TV sitcom.

Campaigning is about emotion. Mario Cuomo said that a politician should campaign in poetry and govern in prose. And the reason why Hillary4U&Me sticks to her so hard and with such negativity is that it connects with her campaign’s paint-by-numbers, old school political machine approach. It feels like something her campaign would actually put out if reality was defined by The Onion.

On the opposite side of the fence: There’s a pretty good article in Newsweek on the Obama campaign’s graphic design.

I think I posted a different article about this before, but this one goes further in depth. It goes so far as to mention that his main font Gotham is a 100% American invented typeface.