1. Americans Against Offshore Oil Drilling Bumper Sticker
2. The American Flag: Not A Religious Symbol Bumper Sticker
3. Pro-Bicycle Share the Road Bumpersticker
4. O: The President Bumper Sticker
5. Obama in many colors bumper sticker
6. Farmers for Peace bumper sticker
7. Sarah Palin is an Idiot bumper sticker
8. Welcome, Immigrants! America is Glad to Have You bumper sticker
9. Welcome to America, Now Speak Navajo bumper sticker
10. Arizona Against SB 1070 bumper sticker

Notable for this month is the relative lack of sales for Barack Obama themed items. These were all the rage back in 2006, 2007, 2008 and even 2009. Now Barack Obama takes a back seat to current events such as the passage of immigrant-unfriendly SB 1070 in Arizona or the oil spill of BP’s Deepwater Horizons (making for Irregular Times’ most popular design of May 2010).

With the end of the month approaching, it’s a good time to look at how the swag’s been swinging. The following are our top ten selling bumper stickers for November of 2009:

1. Question Authority. The saying remains applicable no matter which party is in power, don’t you know.

2. I Support President Obama. Because, FOX News appearances aside, there are still a lot of people in this country who do.

3. Another Old White Woman for Barack Obama. The bumper sticker started out as an don’t-pigeonhole-me alternative to the gender and racial polarization of the Clinton-Obama primary fight, but has remained pretty darned popular over time. Does that indicate that gender and race are still issues regarding the Obama presidency that people feel the need to counter?

4. Value All Families… it needs to be said, especially in yet another election where not all families were valued by voters. (See “Maine,” “Disappointment”)

5. Defend Marriage from Republican Bigots. See above. Who do they think they are to tell everyone else who can get married and who can’t?

6. Health Care for All, a bumper sticker that emerges as players in DC fight over whether this will actually come to pass.

7. Turn Off Your TV and Think: but wait, that’s not what Katie Couric said…

8. Jesus would heal the sick / Health Care Reform Now. Or what, do you think he would ask for proof of insurance first?

9. Is it Vietnam Yet? Sure, they call it “Iraq,” and it’s boxier-looking on the map, but it’s looking more like a quagmire every day…

10. The Thing Worse Than the Rebellion is the Thing that Causes the Rebellion, a saying by Frederick Douglass that still rings true, a century and a half later.

On the left you’ll see the ten most often viewed bumper stickers from our progressive collection in the past week; on the right you’ll see the ten most often bought bumper stickers from the same collection from the same time period.

As you can see, these lists do not have a great deal of overlap. The bumper stickers that are present on both lists represent a current, high-stakes political topic: that of health care reform. Some bumper stickers people come across (FOX News, Voldemort) may stem from searches by people looking for information, not necessarily for stickers. Other bumper stickers people buy (pro-Obama, anti-war, anti-terror, anti-Guantanamo, Maine Marriage “No on 1″) reflect a high conversion rate: not too many people are looking for these messages right now, but the people who are looking for them are committed to sharing their message.

The truth is that when I think about shoppers, I don’t think about people who buy bumper stickers. I think about people who go to shopping malls and buy far too many clothes for themselves.

On the other hand, when people want to find a bumper sticker for themselves, how do they find the right one? Well, they go shopping.

Maybe, in order to be more successful, progressives need to think more about how to help people who are shopping for ways to express their progressive political ideas. Maybe, Kaboodle is the kind of place political progressives need to go more often. If we want people to pay attention to what matters to us, turning the huge shopping infrastructure in our favor couldn’t hurt.

I’ve spend a little bit of time this afternoon exploring the bumper stickers that are already listed on the Kaboodle system, and adding a few more of my own. I find that I appreciate the way that the system allows me to categorize bumper stickers into lists and sub-sections. Is this capitalist system inherently anti-progressive, or can it be legitimately turned into a medium for progressive activation of previously apathetic citizens?

The following are a few bumper stickers I’ve put together into a section called liberty.

Political Bumper Stickers by oakgall

I’d like to hear from other people what they think about this system, and how they’re using it.