Candidates Images

Candidate Images:

Throughout the history of voting, elections and party races in our country there have been specific attributes of candidates that the people are looking for when determining who they want to be there next president, senator, mayor, governor and so on. According to Thomas A. Hollihan in the book, Uncivil Wars: Political Campaigns in a Media Age;

All human beings experience their world by creating images of the objects, events, and people that surround them. These highly subjective images both reflect and create a person’s self-identity. The images that we hold give meaning and purpose to our lives (75).

In reference to candidate images, the things we look for are defined by the above quotation, and these are the elements that we refer to when determining what political candidate we like the most, and ultimately who we will vote for. These images, though ingrained in us, are able to be reevaluated based on new information we may obtain about a specific person or party. Therefore, images we create must be able to be re-crafted in order to fit into our new ideas of that image.

In order to delve deeper into what the significance of candidate images are, and why they are important, I will focus exclusively on presidential candidates for the 2008 election, and how their images were crafted towards a target audience. I will look into different tactics for image creating, and what most candidates aim for.

Out of all the presidential candidates for the 2008 election, there were four that really stood out to me, which do not include the final nominees for Presidency. These candidates include; John Edwards, Fred Thompson, Hilary Clinton, and Rudolph Giuliani. Each of these candidates had a special image about them that made the voting population in the United States very intrigued.

To begin with, Senator John Edwards, who was a Democratic candidate, grew up in a small town in North Carolina. His father was a mill worker and owned his own shop. One of the things that attracted so many voters to Edwards was the hardships he had been through. His wife was battling cancer for some time and his first son died in 1996. These are attributes that voters look for with their candidates; someone who has really lived in the world, and knows what it is like to grow up with little, who knows what it is like to have tragedies strike, and who have strived through it and are able to tell others how to deal with those types of situations.

After in John Edwards’ run for the presidency, it was discovered that he spent a ridiculously large amount of money on a hair cut in California, and that he allegedly had a child with another woman that was not his wife. Although denying these allegations at first, in an August 2008 interview, Edwards admitted to the adulterous affair, but denied that he had fathered that woman’s child. Edwards withdrew from the presidential race due to a lack of success in early election polls, and it was months after this January 2008 pullout that he discussed the truth behind his affair.

Along side John Edwards in the presidential race’s Democratic side, was Senator Hillary Clinton, the wife of former President Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton grew up in a suburb of Chicago, attended Wellesley College where she graduated from in 1969, then attended Yale Law School where she met her future husband, Bill Clinton. Senator Clinton had a lot of experience in the political sphere. She was a part of the impeachment team in the Watergate Scandal, and participated in the Jimmy Carter campaign. When her husband became the governor of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton continued to help with different political campaigns and offices.

While her husband was President, Hillary Clinton had the angst of dealing with a sex scandal that involved her husband. Despite early temptations to leave him, she stayed married to, and supported her husband through his impeachment. Because of Hillary’s strength through her husband’s scandals, many voters stuck behind her, not only in her run for the senate seat after her husband’s presidency was over, but also when she decided to run for President. Hillary Clinton decided she was going to be the first female president of this country, and thus, campaigned long and hard to reach that goal. Many female voters supported Senator Clinton’s aspirations, and therefore continued supporting her candidacy. It was during the 2008 Democratic Primary elections that Hillary Clinton realized her opponent Barack Obama held the majority vote, and therefore dropped out of the race.

On the other side of the political spectrum there was a man named Fred Thompson who was a presidential candidate on the Republican side. Thompson was born in Alabama and was raised in Tennessee where he attended Memphis State University. He later attended Vanderbilt to get his law degree. Thompson was a part of the Watergate Committee where he helped investigate President Nixon and the Watergate scandal. After the Watergate ordeal, Thompson was a lobbyist and lawyer in both Nashville, and Washington DC. In 1985, Thompson was asked to play himself in Marie, which was based on the life of the whistleblower in the Watergate scandal, whom Thompson defended. This launched his acting career where he played in movies with actors such as Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, and Clint Eastwood. When Thompson decided to run for president he was working on the show Law and Order as none other than New York District Attorney.

Even though Thompson had a large political career before he became a well known actor, much of his popularity in his short-lived presidential candidacy came from his popularity in the movies and TV shows that he was a part of. Thompson announced his withdrawal from the presidential race on January 22, 2008.

The final presidential candidate who really had a strong image was former Mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani grew up in New York City, attended Manhattan College, and received his law degree from NYU. Giuliani spent his political career working in the Department of Justice, and as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1983-89.

Giuliani’s surge of popularity came in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. “His adept handling of the situation in the city led to calls for his term in office as mayor to be extended, but he stood down” (A&E Television, 2007). Because of his strength and leadership after the terrorist attacks, Giuliani’s image became even more secure when he ran for president in 2008. Giuliani was a front-runner in the race until he backed out.

Even though all of these presidential candidates from the 2008 election have different images aimed at different audiences, they all have one thing in common, when they are known for something in a positive way, they hold onto that and use it to increase there popularity. Hillary Clinton was a woman running for President, and therefore focused on different topics that would get support from women voters. John Edwards grew up in a middle class family, and attempted to use that as a starting off point for his political campaign. Rudolph Giuliani was there to pick up the pieces after the terrorist attacks in New York City, and used his leadership and eagerness to fight terrorists as his image for this political race for presidency. After all, who does not want a president that will fight terrorism no matter what it takes?!

It is questionable how well these images fit the candidates and whether they were effective or not considering none of them were the final nominees for the presidential race in 2008, but what would be interesting would be to see what people think about these lesser known candidates and how effective their images were in their campaigns.

For more information on each of these candidates, feel free to go to the website I used.

http://www.biography.com/elections/meet_the_candidates.jsp