POST #6 :: On the Early Iconography of Certain of the 2012 Presidential Campaign Logos

[brooklynite]

At first glance, the typography of the Michele Bachmann campaign would seem to fit well within the standard designs that by now are meant to convey to us that there is lurking somewhere a seriousness and legitimacy attached to this campaign for the presidency: the requisite red and blue, the sober and slender fonts that were so successful for Obama last time, and a couple of red stars bracketing the bottom third for good measure. On some pages these stars are a properly conservative white, while on others they appear decisively red. They are certainly colored so only in order to satisfy certain compositional demands, and should in no way be misinterpreted as being due to any secret Bolshevik sympathies.

In Rick Perry’s oddly dull offering, the color scheme of its central icon is particularly objectionable, the blue bleeding into red, the red into blue, creating a purplish, muddled mess. But here as elsewhere we are dealing with a situation where the images are hamstrung, they have no choice, it seems, but to dabble only in variations in reds and blues. To do otherwise might court disaster in color-blind America. So Perry’s image feels it must embrace those separate shades but has no idea what to do with them. We recognize in Perry’s iconography the pharmaceutical sheen of a throat lozenge, as if Perry held out the hope for us of serving as a blue Pfizer pill against the impotence of secular, post-industrial America.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6ZBkD2zWIzI/TbFn0pjj48I/AAAAAAAAAss/dCRj5L9ryKw/s72-c/romney+logo.jpg

Then there is the Romney brand, with what we are meant to see as the opening “R” of his name wedged coyly between waving fields of red and blue. This pattern is repeated, with slightly altered coloration, on all of the official campaign merchandise.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0BgUsijQv3Q/TdNB0xnJOcI/AAAAAAAAERM/GG5KqbdZeOE/s1600/Newt+2012+logo+%2528newt.org%2529.jpg

As for the NEWT2012 image itself: What it possesses most of all is a quality of laziness, as if his many years in Washington were some kind of perverse incentive to avoid the honest work of constructing a campaign iconography suitable to the overt or subterranean desires of the contemporary American populace. One worries about the welfare of such a campaign, and if there is anyone who shall claim individual responsibility for it. We can say that the big blue star, just right of center, carries a kind of grade-school charm.