November 1st

I had a conversation the other day that opened up some old wounds. The marketing director of Cafe Press, a website which sells user-designed t-shirts, stickers and other products gave me a call and asked if I'd be willing to speak to a reporter from the New York Sun about a couple of products I had designed during the election.

Of course, I agreed, and a day later I got a call from Pia Catton who was doing a piece on political bumper stickers. (You can read her article here). The main subjects of our conversation were some stickers that I had almost managed to forget about, emblazoned with the phrases "Clinton/Obama 2012" and "Edwards/Obama 2012". Their humorous message, of course, was that surely Kerry would win election in 2004 and then reelection in 2008 and then in 2012 we'd be looking for a new, progressive president.

In a time when we face the destruction of Social Security, the radicalization of the Supreme Court, the rollback of decades of environmental protections, a never-ending conflict in Iraq and a dozen other threats from the far-right, it now seems like a cruel joke to think about what might have been.

You can see one of my stickers reproduced at the end of the article.

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