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Vote Getters
By GAIL COLLINS
 ack
in the days when people happily hunkered down to listen to two- and
three-hour perorations from their local Congressman, American politics
was all about words. (Were speakers better back then, or was it just
that nobody had anything better to do?) We began shifting to the era of
images after photography was invented and people began noticing that
Franklin Pierce was a good-looking son of a gun and that William Howard
Taft was kind of fat. More than half a century ago, Dwight Eisenhower
hired the actor Robert Montgomery to make sure he looked good on the
new medium of television, and these days a presidential campaign isn't
much more than one long, fast-moving photo op. But for all of
politicians' obsession with the way things look, modern campaigns have
been amazingly short of memorable images. Next year, in commercials all
over the country, candidates will be paying their media experts to make
their opponents' faces morph into Saddam Hussein -- or if it's Chicago,
the guy who grabbed the ball at that Cubs game.
Most
of the visuals we remember from modern politics are the negative ones,
like Willie Horton. We remember the New Frontier, the Great Society
and, of course, ''Read my lips. . . . '' But we rarely remember the
posters or buttons that were displayed across the land during those
campaigns.
Perhaps the reason that modern campaigns are starved for memorable
images is because the creation of them is often governed by the values
of the advertising industry, where the whole point is to convince
people that the product in question is either sexy or tasty -- not
precisely the places a presidential campaign needs to go. In an effort
to raise the bar, the magazine asked top graphic designers to draw the
name of a Democratic presidential candidate from a hat and take a stab
at creating a memorable poster and button. As always, you, the voter,
are the ultimate judge. Slide Show
Gail Collins is editor of The Times's editorial page.
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