Announcing my Obama Rodham McCain universal bumper sticker

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I could make Barack Obama jokes all day. Like this: “Bill Clinton might have been the America’s first black president, but Barack Obama is the nation’s first black Kennedy.” From this you should not surmise that I am for John McCain. I find all three of our current maladies to be just about equally repellent.

But: I did hit upon an idea for a universal Barack Obama bumper sticker.

Writing a workable bumper sticker is the hardest copywriting job there is. Writing at my voluminous length is easy. All you need are ideas and a vocabulary. Writing poetry is hard, because that economy of words is hard. Writing a matchbook or a billboard is even harder.

Here is my best-ever matchbook:

“Save the world from home in your spare time!”

But a bumper sticker… That’s a real writing challenge…

It’s almost typographic iconography: The message has to be brief enough to be big, short enough to be readable in a glance, and yet it must convey a virtual book’s worth of message. Very rare to see it done well.

And I make no claim for this bumper sticker except that it is universal. Whether you are for Barack Obama or against him, you can display this bumper sticker with pride:

If someone wants to pony up the dough for printing — heavy vinyl and UV inks, please — I’ll provide a PDF file. ObamaNation.com is already owned, alas.