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25 Crises of Representation Hate Messages in Campaign 2008 Commercial Paraphernalia1 Jane Caputi As everyone knows, each U.S. president and vice-president until now has been a White man. The election of Barack Obama to the presidency, as well as the historic primary campaign of Hillary Clinton and the Republican vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin, aroused many hopes, but also many fears, resentments, and prejudices revolving around race, sex, gender, class, and religion. The issue of age also became relevant as John McCain was the oldest candidate ever to run for a first term in office. Every presidential election brings with it a glut of official and unofficial promotional and anti-promotional paraphernalia. And every presidential election also brings with it a glut of smears—distortions, epithets, and stereotypes to discredit and besmirch candidates and sitting presidents, right up to George W. Bush.2 But the historic circumstances of the 2008 election ensured that the range, and bite, of the slurs would deepen. At the same time, new media (blogs, e-mail, often sent anonymously, YouTube) and Internet-enabled sales allowed amateurs to get into the business of smearing. It also enabled their invective to achieve an unprecedented range and influence.3 In March 2008, I first heard of a commercial item that shocked me, although it shouldn’t have. It was a T-shirt that read: “I wish Hillary had married O.J.”4 Multiple incendiary meanings are bundled into this one-liner. It wishes Hillary Clinton battered and murdered, while implicitly sideswiping her then rival, Barack Obama, by invoking the stereotype that equates Black men (post-O.J., now to include previously liked and trusted Black men)5 with brutes who menace White, blonde women. This T-shirt inspired me to collect 121 122 / Who Should Be First? similar commercial items associated with the 2008 campaign,6 specifically those flagrantly manifesting misogyny, racism, religious and class prejudice, homophobia , and ageism. Raw and vulgar, these items directly reveal these aspects of the national psyche. As the campaign unfolded, I gathered nearly two hundred artifacts—buttons , stickers, hats, dolls, and posters—and organized these into an exhibit, “Political Circus,”7 which first showed at Florida Atlantic University in fall 2008. My purpose was to document these for the historical record, to categorize and interpret this material culture of negative stereotyping and hate,8 frequently spiked with taboo-violating humor. Soon, these same themes were showing up, sometimes coded, sometimes utterly undisguised, in mainstream rhetoric and imagery. I organized the items into thematic groups, wrote an interpretive text for each category,9 and then set off each grouping with pertinent, often equally outrageous, quotes from journalists, elected officials, pundits, and candidates. Hate messages against Barack Obama did not determine the outcome of the election, but prejudices, racist, sexist and otherwise, obviously remain strong among a portion of the populace. Many lies were spread (Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen) and heinous stereotypes reanimated and reinvented (powerful women castrate men, Blacks are like unto apes, to be a Muslim is to be Osama Bin Laden). Many names were called (freak, bitch, punk), and symbolic threats made (“Beat Hillary”).10 Here, I delineate some of the interrelated smear techniques, as well as their themes involving intersecting11 social meanings of race, sex, age, class, gender, religion, and sexuality. As a verb, smear means, in part, “to overspread with something unctuous , viscous or adhesive . . . BESMIRCH, SULLY.”12 In politics smear is not really a metaphor. The stereotypes and lies discussed here besmirch the targeted individuals with an emotional toxin that lingers and carries with it a very real effect. Character assassination is the intent. In an interview with Bill Moyers on December 7, 2007, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, describes the underlying strategy of visual vilifications: “The people who are producing these products are trying to attach to a candidate what scholars call negative affect”—troubling emotions like fear, discomfort, hate, and humiliation.13 Viewers then associate these emotions with the candidate , even if they don’t necessarily know much about them. For example, consider a button that depicts Michelle Obama’s mien distorted with hate and rage. The universal slash sign for “no” is plastered across her face and the text reads: “Michelle Obama Hates U.S.”14 Actually, of course, the producer of this button wants to make “us” hate Michelle...

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