Atomic Nerds

In an administration that’s rapidly becoming known for tone-deafness, or at least tone-deafness once in office that was nowhere in evidence during the campaign, I think this is my personal high-water benchmark, just barely edging out the open-source enemies list.

The new benchmark: The Obama re-election campaign is soliciting artists to create posters. Well and good. The theme of the posters is to be the Obama administration’s support for, and creation of, jobs. So far, this makes sense; artists helped the first campaign out quite a bit, including Shepard Fairey’s iconic “Hope” image, and they have correctly identified the issue that Americans will likely be most concerned with in the upcoming election year: jobs.

Only two problems with it.

a) The campaign does not intend to pay the artist or artists who come up with posters they’ll use. Their sole compensation of any kind- only granted to artists who create posters the campaign will use- will be a copy of their own work, signed by Obama. This is estimated to be worth maybe around $200, by the campaign itself, which means the estimate is likely to be overly generous. Lest you think that the doors the campaign work will open for the artist are solid gold all on their own, there’s problem

b) The campaign does not necessarily intend to credit the artist(s) for their work, or at least has said nothing on the issue, but DOES explicitly intend to claim all license in perpetutity for any work submitted to the contest whether the design is ever used or not. So there’s no possibility whatsoever that the artist could profit from their own design in cash, and potentially no possibility the artist would even gain in reputation from their work.

So, to recap: In order to glitz up Obama’s message about supporting and creating jobs for Americans, Obama wishes some Americans to work for him for free with not even a guaranteed hope of so much as potentially in any way gaining future jobs from the non-job. That’s a messaging fail it takes some genuine talent in the field of arrogance and tone-deafness to achieve, it’s not a mundane fail.

The only way I can follow the campaign’s thought process here is that it genuinely has no idea that 2012 will be at all different than 2008. In 2008 Obama gained grassroots support from people like Fairey because he represented a potential wind of change blowing out the Bush administration people had become so dissatisfied with; in 2012 people will have had four years of Obama to chew over, and right now they only like him somewhat more than they liked Bush on his way out. Fairey decided to make the poster and not try to sell it to the campaign because he was a street artist and he supported Obama, and he thought they wouldn’t want to be associated with him; now the campaign is asking artists to do the same, in competition with each other, based on the idea that they’d obviously be just thrilled to. To advertise how great Obama is at creating jobs.

The sad thing is, I fully expect whoever the Republican nominee turns out to be to do something just as stupid within about a month of winning the nomination…

Posted current events |