John McQuaid

I don’t see a problem, as some do, with the Obama campaign printing up flyers in German for his speech in Berlin. (Insert snarky comment about German being the predominant language of Germany.)

But the flyer’s design is unnerving:

The Obama campaign has the best graphic designers in the business. They have taken the fusty presidential conventions of signs and bumper stickers and elevated them to a new level, integrating typography, imagery, corporate-style branding and political message into a single streamlined whole. It’s a powerful tool to win votes.

But sometimes they go too far, crafting images that don’t merely suggest “leadership” or “change” but amount to attempted manipulation – as with that ridiculous “presidential seal” that was tried, met with derision, and quickly retired.

The Berlin poster is another misfire – with Obama’s face and its blunt, modernist diagonals, it comes off as cult-of-personality propaganda. The imagery is a cross between Obama-on-Mt.-Rushmore and 20th century totalitarian kitsch.

For example, this SS recruiting poster:

Or this, from one of Stalin’s Five Year Plans:

The point here is not that Obama is a budding totalitarian, but that the high level of orchestration and control of his image, down to the typographical level, tends to devolve into obvious propagandistic fakery. This makes Obama appear to be operating at some airy remove from the rest of us, his campaign imagery employed not for communicating ideas, but as subliminal code. There’s an alarming paternalism there – a campaign is supposed to be a two-way conversation, but this is decidedly one-way.

And the guy’s not even president yet. Imagine what happens when he has the entire machinery of the federal government available to broadcast his chosen message.

Update: John McCain’s graphic designers have decided to go Obama’s one better. Instead of Big Brother, the candidate is being graphically equated with God: