An End To A Bumper Sticker Era
Consider what the world of the bumper sticker was like before the year 2000, when George W. Bush came to power. Bumper sticker design was for big organizations with big money. Those big organizations failed to respond to the problem of President Bush, however, and so, during Bush’s first term in office, a movement of grassroots bumper sticker design was begun.
That anti-Bush bumper sticker movement crested in early 2005, and then was replaced by the phenomenon of the Barack Obama presidential campaign. That campaign, unlike the campaign against Bush in 2004, was centered around one personality, and so the grassroots bumper sticker approach of individuals expressing themselves creatively was replaced by a flash again of the old way of movement uniformity.
Look out on the road today, and you see the result - a lot of official Obama for President bumper stickers, and not very many independently produced items. As long as Obama holds sway over the imagination of the progressive imagination, that’s how it’s going to be, and ironically, that centralized, personality-focused approach, as effective as it has been at electing Obama himself, may be the undoing of progressive idealism itself.
So we see the emergence of a new, post-election group of bumper stickers, with themes such as thank me, I voted for Obama.
Almost disappeared are the issue bumper stickers, and now, the Obama campaign itself is disappearing, to transition through Inauguration 2009 into the Obama Administration.
What will become of progressive activism? Can the progressive grassroots survive, when the White House accepts responsibility for progressive action itself?
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