Political merchandise is meant to excite voters through clever slogans and slick logos, but they rarely produce results. For every cleanly designed shirt or bumper sticker there are a thousand awful ones with corny phrases focus-grouped by the campaign’s adviser’s.
With a new hat “Not A Socialist,” Michael Bloomberg has squelched all lapsed jokes about the tycoon’s coda for presidency. Some pieces of campaign merchandise are so bad that they live in a liminal space that can’t be teased apart from mockery. In this terrain, Bloomberg has taken control and subjugated it.
The timing of the hat’s release may have been meant to take advantage of Bernie Sanders committing to not being a Socialist in the U.S. As the New York Times reported, many believe that “Not A Socialist” caps are outdated stereotypes that campaign will no longer be needed.
Bloomberg has been criticized for their assumption that a socialist society would be unthinkable, despite the popularity of Bernie Sanders in the recent presidential race.
“This hat is just classic false equivalence,” writer Carl Beijer says. “If Democrats were being smart about this they would reject this kind of rhetoric, because this false equivalence is the exact same kind of debate tactic Republicans would’ve used five years ago.”
Bloomberg’s new “not a socialist” cap, available for purchase since November 20th and sought after by conservative Sanders Truthers and Fox and Friends fans, does not conflate with Obama in the public’s eyes. Rather than feeding into the right-wing rhetoric of labels, Bloomberg emphasizes that he can define socialism on his own terms.
I’ll be honest and say that I am and liberal and don’t really care for the Bloomberg “not a socialist” hat.
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