Oh sure, Obama Won.
But one of the Real Winners in ’08 was Mr. Obey, who can now lay claim to having created an Iconic image that transcends many categories and ends up in the history books. And let’s hear it for Community Organizing! – a term snarled from the stage of the puffy pasty convention. Shepard Fairey deserves praise for all the work he did with MoveOn.org and the Obama campaign to bring more diverse voices (many of them voting for the first time) into the big tent and help reclaim a sense of a government for the people by the people. How grand.
And there were many inspired versions of the original Red/Blue Change-Hope-Progress posters, sometimes with themes in direct opposition to Obama’s, sometimes so quirky and wacky that they wandered off the farm. There must have been hundreds – every kid with Photoshop and a smart-alecky wit did a version; maybe wheatpasting it, sometimes planting it on a t-shirt, more often emailing it- now that’s Democracy!
Shepard Fairey Obey: Supply & Demand : The Art of Shepard Fairey