American Broadside

Sloganator

I don't know if you knew this about me, but I've enlisted in the Coalition of the Disgusted and joined the DFL as an active player. For those outside the state of Minnesota, DFL stands for Democrat, Labor, Farmer: an anachronistic throw back to the days 60+ years ago when Minnesota was a Populist state and had progressive political parties not aligned with the main parties. Originally, the DFL was a fusion of Democrats and the Farmer-Labor Party. The DFL is part of the Democratic Party but still holds onto its traditional name. The Republicans were the IR, Independent Republican party, you can guess how long that lasted once Reagan and his lot got into power. All Republican's had to shape up and there went the independent. There might be a lesson there some place.

Pardon me, I digress.

Below is an email I got from the chairman of our Senate District. Our district is the most liberal and active, go figure.

Any way, the Republican use of the Internet is very savvy and almost mythological in its success. On the other hand we Democrats have always felt that the rightness of our beliefs and values was self-evident and besides we are very tolerant of other people's values and prefer not to bad mouth them. We'd rather try to find common ground, compromise, and work things out in a win-win solution.

In these cynical, what's in it for me, times you may think I'm bullshiting you but, those are actual phrases I've heard used by me and my fellow Dems.

Again, I digress.

Occasionally however, the Republicans do something very clever, too clever, and it gets them. The following is an example.

The backstory is as follows: earlier this month, the web site for the Bush-Cheney campaign - the real one, paid for by MBNA America and Richard Scaife - featured a "create your own banner" tool, where you could enter your own slogan and print out your own poster, with the Bush-Cheney logo, and a note at the bottom "paid for by Bush-Cheney '04, Inc." Democrats, of course, couldn't get enough of this. The original sloganator accepted everything, then it started censoring profanity and words like "Hitler" "dictator," and "evil".

Nevertheless,many clever folks exploited the sloganator to their own ends before its sad demise only a couple of weeks after its birth, and its mourners assembled some of the best for the slide show.

The link below is best enjoyed with the sound on:

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~meo232/sloganator/

posted by Les @ 8:11 AM