Senator Barack Obama claimed the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday night, prevailing through an epic battle with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in a primary campaign that inspired millions of voters from every corner of America to demand change in Washington.
Now the half-Kenyan-by-way-of-Hawaii candidate, who only recently completed a beer-and-bowling tour to impress blue-collar Midwesterners, has committed more fully to showing off his inner Jew.
Can a typeface truly represent a presidential candidate?
What does Optima say about John McCain? And should this, or any, candidate be judged by a typeface?
Consider typography to be the window into the soul of the candidate’s campaign. The depth, the breadth, the good, the bad and the ugly is all there for us to witness and assess in one clear and telegraphic manner. And in this campaign, what you see is definitely what you will get.
...
It is a rather bland face being used in a rather bland way.
It seems a bit elitist and upscale for John McCain.
It sort of reeks of old thrift-shop, Danish furniture, and not in a good way.
It’s a typeface used to trick people into thinking they are involving themselves in something more important and more desirable than it actually is.
It is a typeface I associate with the 1970s: moving past the hygienic purity of, say, a humanist sans-serif and migrating ever so slightly toward fern bars and big hair.
John McCain | Warrior or warmonger? | The Economist
Topic: Elections
7:51 pm EDT, Apr 5, 2008
In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both “an idea and a cause”. He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself. But many voters would rather not suffer at all.
Mike Huckabee, the folksy former governor of Arkansas and Baptist preacher, won the Iowa Republican caucus with a strong late surge that buried his principal rival, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts.
On the Democratic side, with 86% of precincts reporting, Senator Barack Obama had 37 percent of delegates allocated under the Democratic Party’s system, while former senator John Edwards and Hillary Rodham Clinton each had 30 percent.
The American benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require new elections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, previously known as SCIRI), which now controls seven of the nine southern governorates, would certainly lose ground to Moqtada al-Sadr. His main base is in Baghdad and new elections would almost certainly leave his followers in control of Baghdad Governorate, with one quarter of Iraq's population. Iraq's decentralized constitution gives the governorates enormous powers and significant shares of the national budget, if they choose to exercise these powers. New local elections are not required until 2009 and it is hard to see how early elections strengthening al-Sadr, who is hostile to the US and appears to have close ties to Iran, serve American interests. But this is precisely what the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress seems to want.
But even if Iraq's politicians could agree to the benchmarks, this wouldn't end the insurgency or the civil war. ... The differences are fundamental and cannot be papered over by sharing oil revenues, reemploying ex-Baathists, or revising the constitution. The war is not about those things.
On June 25, Richard Lugar, the most respected Republican voice on foreign affairs in Congress, noted that agreements reached with Iraqi leaders are most often not implemented ... because Iraqi leaders have discovered that telling the Bush administration what it wants to hear is a fully acceptable substitute for action.
