Larry Sabato provides a little insight on the presidential campaign slogans of days gone by:
Wiith the dawn of the new year, the campaigns for president are moving into high gear, at least in private. Strategies are being fine-tuned, consultants and staff are being hired, donors are choosing sides. But no campaign ought to ignore the crucial element of a good slogan.
Oh, the superficiality of it all! That’s what the sophisticates say. Yet a well-chosen phrase can power a candidate if the words ring true and connect to the theme of the election. Slogans are simplistic and manufactured, but the best ones fire up the troops and live on in history.
Offhand I’m guessing that Sec. Clinton wouldn’t use my preferred slogan for her: “Vote for Hillary! At this point what difference does it make?” Dr. Sabato proposes “Let’s Make History Again!” which has a nicer ring to it.
Without looking can you identify the campaigns these slogans were used for:
Don’t change horses in midstream
Vote as you shot
Let well enough alone
He kept us out of war
We are turning the corner
Lincoln (and later FDR)
Grant
McKinley
Wilson
Hoover
You can reveal the answers by selecting and highlighting the blank space between the slogans and here. Or by reading Dr. Sabato’s post which includes these and others.
Hat tip: memeorandum
I am more familiar with Grant’s slogan, “Let Us Have Peace,” from his 1968 acceptance letter. I suspect Grant supporters used the “vote as you shot” slogan. War and peace, something for everybody.
I presume that would be 1868.
Offhand I’m guessing that Sec. Clinton wouldn’t use my preferred slogan for her: “Vote for Hillary! At this point what difference does it make?†Dr. Sabato proposes “Let’s Make History Again!†which has a nicer ring to it.
How about “You’ve voted for dicks, now vote for the cu…”
Nah, wouldn’t fly….
I knew the first & fourth. Liked the third a lot. A true slogan for the status quo!
I also only knew the first and the fourth (and Ellipses read a Grant biography somewhat recently I believe) I thought “We are turning a corner” might have been an alternate for Reagan, though not as famous as Morning in America. Maybe I’m thinking of a mid-term theme.
An item of historical interest is the extent to which the President or what we would now call the President’s campaign were involved in these slogans. I don’t think Lincoln liked the vote for the rail-splitter slogan and I don’t know where it originated. William Henry Harrison was called a “log cabin and hard cider” candidate by the Democrats, before the Whigs took it up as a good slogan, but again I don’t know how that happened.
The irony was that Martin Van Buren actually came from humble circumstances while Harrison’s family was well-to-do rather than the other way around.
The Grant biography was a year and a half ago, I think, so yes, recently. But I don’t remember that slogan at all.