Poster Boy

W's campaign catches Web goof, but not in time to foil pranksters.

by Brian Hickey

It seems as if the boys and girls in the GOP still haven’t quite grasped the Internet’s political power. How else can one explain the short-lived existence of the "create custom posters" feature on the www.georgewbush.com re-election Web site?

Launched in December, the nifty little tool allowed Web-goers to plug in their home state, city and coalition affiliation before scripting a custom message to appear on their very own campaign poster. When properly done -- the site boasted, "it is as easy as 1-2-3" -- the information appeared above both a big ol' Bush-Cheney '04 slogan and a "Paid for by Bush-Cheney '04 Inc." disclaimer.

While messages of heartfelt support probably danced about Karl Rove's head like best-intentioned sugarplums, things took a turn for the worse (make that way worse) when the general public caught on just a week before the March 20 anniversary of the war in Iraq.

Ana Marie Cox, editor of the Beltway political-gossip blog www.wonkette.com, says she first got an e-mail about the Web tool March 5 and posted information about it on her site a few days later. Before long, she had a couple hundred responses from those who'd made their own hilarious signs.

"[At first] I didn't realize the comic possibilities," Cox said from D.C. on Monday.

Needless to say, the information made an obligatory dash toward inboxes across the nation, including one here at the City Paper. And, of course, once that happened, the game was on. Campaign posters with slogans ranging from "Mentally Slower Than the Average Man" and "Destroying Communities on a Lark" to "Cocaine, Mmm Mmm Good" and "Don't Fear the Reaper" were soon flying off the LaserWriters.

Of course, it wasn't possible to doctor up the posters to say anything. Profanity was off-limits. Also taboo were racial slurs and, strangely enough, words like Iraq, dumb and stupid. (Despite those restrictions, there was an end-around whereby a space between letters in just about any word rendered it usable, not to mention bin Laden working in lieu of the banned Osama. Still, why'd they nix "Pimps up, Hos down"?)

Alas, the campaign game came to an unceremonious end a day later -- March 11 -- as the Web site was retooled to eliminate custom messages. Luckily, the signs were saved to some computer desktops upon creation. (Though John Kerry's site offers downloadable posters too, they can't be doctored. But even if they could, can a fake slogan be worse than the pre-made "Kerry Rocks!" poster featuring the starched candidate wielding an electric guitar?)

Bush's folks didn't return several calls for comment about the removal, but electronic campaign manager Chuck DeFeo, quoted last week on www.wired.com, said, "Their action says a lot about people who are 100 percent committed to using profane and vulgar language in the place of substantive dialog on the important issues facing America today."

No Chuck, we love dialogue. So in the spirit of democracy -- and keeping Dubya's custom-poster drive alive -- here's a couple clip-and-save campaign signs for anybody to proudly post wherever they'd like.

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