Recently I was asked by Christopher Bateman of Vanity Fair to give some perspective on how the current political candidates are using the web to build grassroots support for their campaigns. You can see the article here. One of the things that I noticed from VF, was that we included Obama, Hillary, and McCain, but the article link is ( …/obama-vs-mccain.html ). hmmm?

One thing that they didn’t get to fit in to the piece was the fact that Hillary came out with a poster, very similar to the shepard fairey style.   I have included these visual examples below.  The Hillary poster looks like a Mao poster, and it just says “Hillary”, which kinda creeped me out.  The Obama poster actually has a message… “Change” or “Hope”.  Shepard was inspired by Obama, created the art, and then it was co-opted by the Obama Campaign.  The Hillary poster appears to be a rip-off of the Obama poster, created by a hollywood screen writer named Tony Puryear, who says…

“Senator Clinton is a beautiful, strong and inspiring woman, and I wanted to make a poster that reflected that. Rather than putting a slogan on the poster, I chose to put her name, because she is surely the only leader at this level with whom we are all on a first-name basis, and to me, that reflects her personal warmth and connection with ordinary Americans.”

It sounds honest enough, but I see a poster that looks scarily similar to Shepard’s work. It makes me think about that summer in 1998 when Armageddon came out at the same time as Deep Impact. Remember?