NM Pop Politics

This morning’s Washington Post does something to answer a question that’s been bugging me since the Iowa caucuses: What happens to Obama’s personality cult after he takes office?

All those HOPE posters were neat during the campaign, but just admit: It’ll be a little creepy if Obama’s face is still staring down at you from every other wall after he becomes Commander in Chief.

Sure, the man’s not going to rename parts of the calendar in honor of himself. But Obama’s transition plan does include turning his campaign network into a direct-to-the-people propaganda machine that’ll make Fox News look amateurish:

Obama aides and allies are preparing a major expansion of the White House communications operation, enabling them to reach out directly to the supporters they have collected over 21 months without having to go through the mainstream media.
Just as John F. Kennedy mastered television as a medium for taking his message to the public, Obama is poised to transform the art of political communication once again, said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who first helped integrate the Internet into campaigning four years ago.
“He’s going to be the first president to be connected in this way, directly, with millions of Americans,” Trippi said.

Crap. Guess we can look forward to at least four more years of Obama spam.

Hat tip to JM

Rob Paravonian loves him some America!

Now normally I don’t find allusions to abusive relationships funny at all, but somehow Paravonian has managed to take the ideas of stalking and obession to a place where they’re so over the top they actually work. “Whose your founding father bitch? She’d better say it’s me.”

Maybe what makes this so funny is that we’re all so overprotective right now. Judging from the status updates on my friend’s Facebook pages if McCain wins everyone I know, with the exception of the one soul brave enough to admit pride in his Republican vote, will have a complete and utter breakdown.

Maybe we are a little too obsessed with this election. So no more. Ignore it until tonight. Don’t spend the day fretting about something that’s out of your hands now, unless you haven’t voted yet–in that case GET OFF THE INTERNET AND GO GET IN LINE.

Americans, here it is: solid and unequivocal proof that John McCain is not planning on living much longer and, by extension, has been setting up Sarah Palin for the presidential post all along. In his presumably final campaign email this morning, there resides the following curious clause:

I humbly ask you to make the choice that will allow me to serve my country a little while longer by casting your vote to elect me as your next President of the United States.

Just a “little while longer!” Jesus, get out and vote or get shot from a helicopter by your new commander in chief.

See the selection and the whole horrifying email below.

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Intrade.com, an online trading exchange website where  members can speculate (i.e. bet) on the outcomes of pretty much any and every future event, shows that traders are heavily favoring Obama to win the NM electoral college votes and Udall to take the New Mexico Senate.  Not like we couldn’t deduce that information based on last Saturdays rallies in Albuquerque where over 45,000 people went to see Obama speak at UNM’s Johnson Field, and less then 1,000 people went to see McCain speak at the Fairgrounds.

BUT…If your looking to make some money off the results of this election we recommend betting on…McCain and Pearce and here’s why.

As of this morning, Intraders are predicting an 87.1 percent chance that Obama will win the New Mexico electoral college votes while they are betting that there is less then a 12% chance McCain will get them.  The Intrade system is set up so that 100 percent is equal to $10.  This means that the asking price for Obama stock this morning is a whopping $8.80 a share while McCain’s asking price is only $1.50 a share.  So, since Obama will likely win New Mexico, you will only get $1.20 back for every $8.80 cents you invest.  If you bet on McCain and he actually manages to win New Mexico’s electoral college vote, you win big and gain a lot more off your investment.

The same theory applies for New Mexico’s Senate race, where it looks as though Democrat Tom Udall basically has it locked up.  Intraders are betting that there is a 90 percent chance that Udall will win the election and take the Senate seat.  Udall stock is selling for an impressive $9.50 as of this morning.  Republican Steve Pearce on the other hand has only been given a 5 percent chance of winning and his stock is selling for $1.00 a share.

The graphs below show a detailed breakdown of the ups and downs each candidate has experienced over the last month of campaigning.

On the 16th of October, immediately following the presidential debate was a NM senate debate.  Udall, bettered his numbers while Pearce found himself falling slightly in Intrade percentage points.  Both Udall and Pearce experienced a fluctuation on October 23rd when Udall’s percentage increased from 90.5 percent to 92.5 percent and Pearce’s decreased two percentage points falling from 9 percent to 7 percent. The final NM senate debate on October 26 didn’t seem to effect either candidate’s percentage points, but October 29th showed another significant change: Udall gained anoher 3 points and Pearce losing 2.

Shepard Fairey, a Los Angeles-based street artist and propaganda engineer, has gotten a lot of attention for donating his red-white-and-blue Barack Obama design to the Illinois senator’s presidential campaign.  The “Hope” posters are everywhere, including bumper stickers and windows all over Santa Fe (I saw two posters in the windows of a house next to the County Clerk’s office on my way to cast my early vote on Tuesday).

There have of course been lots of copycat designs showing up and even our sister paper in Portland, the Willamette Week, is on the bandwagon: They used a Fairey-inspired Palin portrait with the word NOPE across the bottom for the front cover of their Oct. 15th endorsement issue.

Here in Santa Fe, the local chapter of IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) on Cerrillos Rd. is using Fairey’s work to advertise for their own political endorsements. Along with a blow-up of the original Obama poster (the union googled the image and had it printed fairly cheaply), the front of their building boasts a big Fairey-inspired poster of Third Congressional District candidate Ben Ray Lujan with the word ESPERANZA (that’s Spanish for “hope,” gringos). This is cool, but the folks at the IATSE tell SFR their PAC paid a graphic designer (whose name was not provided to us) $1,000 for the design.

That’s a lot of money for someone to copy another artist’s design (and for a PAC to pay for a poster!) So what does Mr. Fairey think about all this? SFR couldn’t reach him for a comment, but we did find this interview by NPR’s Farai Chideya. Chideya asks, “Do you ever feel that people have crossed a line with the use of your image, that the way in which people have decided to replicate it or alter it is something that you’ve got to put a stop to, and can you put a stop to it?”  Here’s what Fairey has to say about it:

My objective in creating the image was just to make people curious about Obama, they would check him out further and see his merits the way I see them hopefully, and I’ve put every dime that I’ve made from Obama posters and art back into either making more materials or donating to the campaign up to the legal limit. However there are some people who are making bootlegs and they’re just pocketing the money. I try to spend my time doing positive things but I don’t think that’s right so I’ve tried to at least get the worst offenders selling shirts in airports and things like that and have them divert some of their profits back to the Obama campaign, not to me. Really what I think all the knock-offs, bootlegs, parodies say is how much the image has resonated and how much it has become a reference point, a symbolic reference point. In that sense I’m very happy that people care to riff off of it, and really all is forgiven if Obama gets elected.

Fairey also says that when he sold the initial run of posters he decided to sell them “for less than I sell my usual posters figuring that maybe a partisan image would have a lower demand and immediately, not only did the image go viral, but it was being sold on eBay for between $1,000-$5,000, when I sold the initial print run for $45 each.”  Fairey might not be too happy to learn someone got paid a thousand smackeroos for a mere copy of his design–but then again, if he was too busy to take our call, he probably would’ve been too busy to take IATSE’s. (WWeek also paid an artist-who-is-not-Fairey for their design: Barry Stock.)

On another interesting note, according to animalnewyork.com, earlier this year Fairey threatened to sue the graphic designer Baxter Orr for selling parodies of his designs, in particular a spoof on his famous Obey Giant design, in which Orr replaces the wrestler’s mouth with a surgical mask.  In an official statement, Fairey says:

This graphic is a registered trademark and I selectively enforce this trademark based on the nature of the infringement. Frequently I do not respond negatively to parodies of Obey because I feel the artist doing the parody is philosophically aligned with Obey and parody is a valid part of pop culture dialog. I use parody and tribute often in my own work, so I obviously believe there is value to both…Orr’s infringement is being pursued more because of his all around exploitative tendencies and foul nature rather than the seriousness of this specific infringement.

Reported by Erin Brooks

Tonight, four networks are airing Barack Obama’s 30-minute special. Don’t groan, it might not be that boring. In fact, there’s a familiar name behind it: Mark Putnam, who directed Bill Richardson’s clever “job interview” advertisements during the primary season. SFR spoke with Putnam in late 2007 for the Bill Richardson portion of our Top 10 stories of the year issue–He’s a funny, creative guy, who has been directing Bill’s spots since 2005.

Chris Henderson has spent the last four years traveling the world as an intelligence officer for the U.S. Air Force, including a year-long deployment in Iraq.  Now the 27-year-old New Mexican is traveling the state for Obama’s Campaign for Change.  SFR’s Erin Brooks spoke with Henderson–a former Republican–about his mission to get Sen. Obama elected .

SFR: Why did you decide to leave the Republican Party?

CH:  I really do think that the deep thinking and intellectual currents that used to run in the Republican party, William F. Buckley being a good example, they’re either not there anymore or they’re silent.  And I just noticed that there was more and more just negativity and division coming out of the Republican Party.  But the thing that really sparked it was Iraq, I just thought that it was such a massive mistake to wage that war, and I thought that the Republican handling of the war, in the first 3-plus years of it, was so bad that, that alone means to me the Republicans ought not to be in power for awhile.  I think they have earned a period in isolation, in political isolation, based upon that decision.  I mean, it has been so detrimental to the country, to the military, in our international standing, to our ability to respond to other problems in the world. Frankly, there are still problems in the War on Terror, as President Bush calls it, and those are primarily in Afghanistan, as Sen. Obama has identified over and over and over again.  We really do need to transfer this over to the Iraqis. They need to take responsibility for themselves. [TheIraq  war] consumes a huge amount of our resources and we need to dedicate those resources, both financial and military, to actually going after the terrorist groupings that committed 9/11… Sen. Obama has identified that over and over and over again, and Sen. McCain just keeps emphasizing Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. Well, our next commander in chief is going to be commander in chief of more than just Iraq.

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By now, you’ve probably seen the New Mexico Sun News’ premature declaration, “Obama Wins!”  If you’re like me, you wish it would go away because you are too traumatized by Nov 3, 2004. But here’s to having a sense of humor—hopefully one that helps and doesn’t hurt.

Here’s the CNN Political Ticker link.

With the McCain-Obama dance-off meme, emailed to us last night by Laura P, .

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