I don't know what possessed me to do this, but after dinner this evening I felt an uncontrollable urge to check out the campaign
swag offered on the websites of the main U.S. presidential candidates. The attached image is a somewhat arbitrary selection of what the respective candidates are peddling, based on what seemed to me in the moment to be most revealing about each of them.
TrumpMake America Great Again has morphed into
Keep America Great. The not-exactly-subtle delusion here is that Trump's first term has restored some form of grandeur to the United States, which is, to say the least, questionable.
BidenJoe Biden's "cup o’ Joe" ("joe" being a somewhat antiquated slang term for coffee) presumably is intended to show that good ol' Joe is just a regular guy; it's also the kind of play on words which no doubt would have seemed clever during the election campaign of 1948.
KlobucharAmy Klobuchar's understated white-on-green banner implies that her competition is making unsustainable claims while she, the middle-America "flyover country" candidate, is offering practical, albeit undefined, solutions.
WarrenElizabeth Warren has "a plan" for just about everything, and clearly settling on just one of them required more self-editing than she could muster. Other variations of this banner include different plans, but always in multiples.
ButtigiegPete Buttigieg obviously wants the voters to know that everyone is welcome to support him, although it's not exactly obvious what this sequence of words is intended to convey―which vagueness, of course, may be precisely what he intends to convey.
SandersBernie Sanders seems to have borrowed the design from Buttigieg, but the message is pure Bernie: a promise that a Sanders Administration will be a cascade of government benefits that is genuinely "revolutionary"―feasibility of enactment optional.
BloombergMike Bloomberg may have had to absorb a number of incoming salvos from his competitors in last night's Democratic Party debate, but this campaign button conveys that he has no intention of taking his eye off the real target, as well as that he has the best copywriters money can buy.
