Cartoons on Hilary’s Campaign
People’s perception is very important for candidates running for political office in a national election. Bad media images can result in loosing an election or nomination to political offices. Thus, the national and international press have a huge influence in creating positive or negative images of candidates. Political cartoonists and caricaturists have a lot of power in Internet and digital age. I have looked through some of the political cartoons on Hilary Clinton, campaigning for the Democrat Party nomination for the next President of the United States. Most of the cartoons on and about her did not give a positive image of her to the public. Just to give an example from the collection in Daryl Cagle”s International Cartoon Index. One cartoon shows Hilary planting seeds for questions.
The other cartoons show her being under fire
and in passing memories.
Other negative catoons, showing her holding a dog on-leach to bite Barak Obama.
The worse is the one of Bill Clinton having his hand under her skirt.
In contrast, I don’t see many cartoons of Barak Obama doing something funny with his wife Michelle. Both men and women have to struggle when they run for political office. Barak Obama has negative cartoons about being a “Black “ candidate, although I don’t think of him as representing “Black Americans” because he is half-white. He is a multi-racial/cultural person. In the same way, I don’t think Hilary represents American women. She does not even have any experience similar to majority of American women. Her experience is that of an elite graduate from a prestigious Wellesley University. She has a successful lawyer career, and a wife of President Bill Clinton. Last year in my Blog on Political Wives and Daughters, I said that if Hililary wins the election she is following the traditional woman’ s route - gaining political power through the prestige and network connections of the husband, or the father. Some people says that she has broken a glass-ceiling for other American women in politics. A role model. I don’t think she is a role model to other American women who struggle for achievement based on her own political connections and network. She is a role model only to other ambitious wives of male politicians. I have to admit that many people don’t want to see “women in national and international leadership positions”, but I don’t think Hilary gets negative press because of being a woman running for election. She has image problem because of peculiarity of her behavior, her marital connection to President Bill Clinton, and what she did when she was the “First Lady”.
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