Everyday I go through the images of this presidential campaign to keep track of the visual narrative. It’s easy enough to find pictures of Barack Obama. There are the regular Obama-amidst-a-crowd images, there was the fist bump, screaming paper front pages, childhood pictures and loads of fan art (examples 1, 2 and 3). But everyday I’m struggling to find visuals of John McCain. There are some editorial cartoons, usualy mocking his age or comparing him to Bush, and often I run into pictures of McCain the Vietnam war hero. But that’s about it. There are of course also McCain’s campaign trail pictures. They’re distinctive for how indistinctive they are; there’s nothing that catches the eye. Actually sometimes it’s hard to spot the candidate himself. This morning I was struck by a McCain picture where I could literally not distinguish the Senator:

This photo was taken during a town hall meeting at Federal Hall in New York. McCain is obliterated by the architecture; no logos or whatsoever can be seen. Compare that to this picture that was shown across the media:

Obama’s face and logo fill the whole image.

I looked up the visual coverage of McCains’s NY event, made a compilation of it and couldn’t help but wonder: “Where’s Waldo McCain?”

Category: Visuals