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Yes We Can: Barack Obama's History-Making Presidential Campaign
Yes We Can is a personal and comprehensive record of Barack Obama’s world-changing campaign for the presidency With more than 200 color photographs by award-winning photojournalist Scout Tufankjian, the book takes the reader on an unforgettable journey. Barack Obama’s run for president touched something profound in America, awakening a civic engagement, pride, and passion that many had perhaps given up on. In the course of his campaign, Obama inspired millions of Americans - young and old, rich and poor, rural and urban, and from every racial and ethnic background. These images, by the only photographer who covered his entire campaign from start to finish, pay heed not only to the man who would be President, but also the people who came to see him, hear him, and vote for him. Yes We Can is a rich portrait of Obama’s historic campaign — a campaign that is as much about Americans and their hopes and dreams as it is about the man that gave them voice. A Look Inside Yes We Can: Barack Obama's History-Making Presidential Campaign with Photographer Scout TufankjianThe first time I photographed Barack Obama, I really didn’t want to go. I knew who he was and was interested in him, but I had plans for that weekend — plans that did not involve driving five hours to New Hampshire to photograph what I assumed would be a deadly dull event. But when Kelly Price, my editor at Polaris Images, told me the German newsmagazine Stern would pay me to make that five hour drive, I canceled my plans, climbed into my Camry, and drove up to Portsmouth. It was probably the best decision I ever made. To some extent, my predictions had been accurate. The book signing was a photographer’s nightmare. The building was huge, dark, cavernous, and impossible to find. I showed up late and in a panic. Looking around, I was convinced that there was no way I was going to be able to make a decent picture in that room. When Obama walked into the room, my aesthetic issues with the room became immediately irrelevant. The crowd was transfixed. Hell, some of the other news photographers were transfixed. And this was New Hampshire! New Hampshire photographers are not impressed by politicians. Ever. Immediately after the event was over, even before filing my pictures, I called Kelly and told her that I was going to cover the Obama presidential campaign. I did not offer her a choice. The fact that he wasn’t technically running yet was immaterial. I knew that this was going to be important and I wanted to be there. Despite my complete lack of “on-the-bus” experience, the national editor at Newsweek took a huge risk and assigned me to cover Barack Obama’s announcement tour. For the first two days of the campaign I would be a part of the traveling press corps. I would have to learn fast. And I did. For the next twenty-three months, I followed Obama from event to event, only heading home for quick breaks to meet with editors and to remind my boyfriend what I looked like. I followed him into coffee shops and diners, auto manufacturing plants and bowling alleys. I followed him in a rental car and I flew in his charter jet. I photographed Obama wooing potential voters in huge, expensive houses and on poverty-stricken Indian reservations. I covered small events, where I was the only photographer present, and I covered massive rallies with more than 75,000 people in cities like Denver and Berlin. Even as the campaign stretched from one year to two, and as I marked my third winter photographing the Senator, I have not lost interest in this campaign and the people that have supported it. Whether the audience included a skeptical old farmer from Tama, Iowa, who was surprised to slowly realize that he had something in common with this young black politician from Hawaii or an eight-year-old boy from LA who couldn’t stop saying “He is going to be President! He looks like me and he is going to be President!” the people’s reaction to the Senator and his campaign have fueled my work. The looks on their faces, the questions on their lips, and the ways that they hang on his every word, are a constant reminder of how lucky I have been to document this moment in history. -Scout Tufankjian
The Journey of an American Icon: Excerpts from Yes We Can |
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Price: $18.78
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Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs
Through 150 striking color photographs, Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs charts the road to Barack Obama's nomination as the first African American to lead the presidential ticket of a major party. Announcing his campaign in Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, 2007, Obama stood on the grounds of the Old State Capitol, where Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous "House Divided" speech against slavery in 1858. During an eighteen-month campaign, from the snows of Iowa to the hunt for Democratic "superdelegates," this junior senator from Chicago confounded the party establishment and rewrote the playbook on modern presidential campaigning. This amazing collection of photographs captures the public and private moments of his journey, and offers a unique window into one of the great triumphs in American politics. .
Price: $12.22
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McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope
Is John McCain "For Real?" That's the question David Foster Wallace set out to explore when he first climbed aboard Senator McCain's campaign caravan in February 2000. It was a moment when Mccain was increasingly perceived as a harbinger of change, the anticandidate whose goal was "to inspire young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest." And many young Americans were beginning to take notice. To get at "something riveting and unspinnable and true" about John Mccain, Wallace finds he must pierce the smoke screen of spin doctors and media manipulators. And he succeeds-in a characteristically potent blast of journalistic brio that not only captures the lunatic rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign but also delivers a compelling inquiry into John McCain himself: the senator, the POW, the campaign finance reformer, the candidate, the man..
Price: $4.98
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Get Out the Vote, Second Edition: How to Increase Voter Turnout
The first edition of Get Out the Vote! broke ground by introducing a new scientific approach to the challenge of voter mobilization and profoundly influenced how campaigns operate. In this expanded and updated edition, the authors incorporate data from more than one hundred new studies, which shed new light on the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of various campaign tactics, including door-to-door canvassing, e-mail, direct mail, and telephone calls. Two new chapters focus on the effectiveness of mass media campaigns and events such as candidate forums and Election Day festivals. Available in time for the core of the 2008 presidential campaign, this practical guide on voter mobilization is sure to be an important resource for consultants, candidates, and grassroots organizations. .
Price: $16.00
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Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work (Studies in Communication, Media, and Public Opinion)
It is common knowledge that televised political ads are meant to appeal to voters' emotions, yet little is known about how or if these tactics actually work. Ted Brader's innovative book is the first scientific study to examine the effects that these emotional appeals in political advertising have on voter decision-making. At the heart of this book are ingenious experiments, conducted by Brader during an election, with truly eye-opening results that upset conventional wisdom. They show, for example, that simply changing the music or imagery of ads while retaining the same text provokes completely different responses. He reveals that politically informed citizens are more easily manipulated by emotional appeals than less-involved citizens and that positive "enthusiasm ads" are in fact more polarizing than negative "fear ads." Black-and-white video images are ten times more likely to signal an appeal to fear or anger than one of enthusiasm or pride, and the emotional appeal triumphs over the logical appeal in nearly three-quarters of all political ads. Brader backs up these surprising findings with an unprecedented survey of emotional appeals in contemporary political campaigns. Politicians do set out to campaign for the hearts and minds of voters, and, for better or for worse, it is primarily through hearts that minds are won. Campaigning for Hearts and Minds will be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how American politics is influenced by advertising today. .
Price: $17.33
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Campaign Craft: The Strategies, Tactics, and Art of Political Campaign Management Third Edition (Praeger Series in Political Communication)
With careful attention and hard work, even average citizens can oversee sophisticated, state-of-the-art political campaigns. Those who try will find no aid more valuable than this book. Bringing to bear both academic and professional experience, Shea and Burton present a lively, comprehensive exploration of cutting-edge political campaign management. They cover every aspect of present-day political campaigning, from understanding the context of a particular campaign (national trends, the media market, demographic research, etc.) to strategic thinking and specific voter contact techniques that work. These techniques include tactical use of fundraising, paid media, free media--including the Internet--and get-out-the-vote drives. Throughout the text, the authors present up-to-date analysis, peppered with examples from national, state, and local campaigns. Campaign Craft is a comprehensive guide to modern electioneering--a "must read" for candidates and political activists, scholars, researchers, and all those interested in knowing how to run modern, high-tech campaigns..
Price: $24.26
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Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment
Rupert Murdoch's recent multibillion-dollar purchase of the Wall Street Journal made international news. Yet it is but one more chapter in an untold story: the rise of an integrated conservative media machine that all began with Rush Limbaugh in the 1980s. Now Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella--two of the nation's foremost experts on politics and communications--offer a searching analysis of the conservative media establishment, from talk radio to Fox News to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Indeed, here is the first serious account of how the conservative media arose, what it consists of, and how it operates. To show how this influential segment of the media works, the authors examine the uproar that followed when Senator Trent Lott seemed to endorse Strom Thurmond's segregationist past. Limbaugh called the remarks "utterly indefensible," but added that a "double standard" was in play. That signaled a broad counterattack by the conservative media establishment, charging the mainstream media with hypocrisy (yet using its reports when convenient), creating a knowledge base (a set of facts or allegations for partisans to draw upon), and fostering an in-group identity. By analyzing such cases, together with survey data, Jamieson and Cappella find that Limbaugh, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal opinion pages create a self-protective enclave for conservatives, shielding them from other information sources, and promoting strongly negative associations with political opponents. Limbaugh in particular, they write, fuses the roles of party leader and opinion leader in a fashion reminiscent of the nineteenth century's partisan newspaper editors. The rise of conservative media has fundamentally changed American politics. This thoughtful study offers the most authoritative and insightful account of this revolutionary phenomenon available today..
Price: $13.69
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Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent
In 1920, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs ran for president while serving a ten-year jail term for speaking against America’s role in World War I. Though many called Debs a traitor, others praised him as a prisoner of conscience, a martyr to the cause of free speech. Nearly a million Americans agreed, voting for a man whom the government had branded an enemy to his country. In a beautifully crafted narrative, Ernest Freeberg shows that the campaign to send Debs from an Atlanta jailhouse to the White House was part of a wider national debate over the right to free speech in wartime. Debs was one of thousands of Americans arrested for speaking his mind during the war, while government censors were silencing dozens of newspapers and magazines. When peace was restored, however, a nationwide protest was unleashed against the government’s repression, demanding amnesty for Debs and his fellow political prisoners. Led by a coalition of the country’s most important intellectuals, writers, and labor leaders, this protest not only liberated Debs, but also launched the American Civil Liberties Union and changed the course of free speech in wartime. The Debs case illuminates our own struggle to define the boundaries of permissible dissent as we continue to balance the right of free speech with the demands of national security. In this memorable story of democracy on trial, Freeberg excavates an extraordinary episode in the history of one of America’s most prized ideals. (20080303).
Price: $18.25
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Packaging The Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising
"If political advertising did not exist, we would have to invent it," writes Katherine Hall Jamieson in her widely praised study, Packaging the Presidency. Now in a new Third Edition, Jamieson expands her authoritative analysis of political advertising, looking at the media campaigns of American presidents from the early days of the republic to the successful 1992 Clinton campaign. Chronicling the evolution of the campaign ad from political songs and slogans through the handbill and newspaper cartoon to radio and television coverage, an argument emerges that is subtle but persuasive: though often equivocal, and even downright sleazy, political advertising is vital in reminding voters of the choices at the heart of democracy. Much of the book, appropriately, focuses on the powerful media campaigns of the post-war period. In individual chapters devoted to presidential campaigns since 1952, the claims of media strategists, campaign memos, and journalists frame discussions on the impact of candidates from Adlai Stevenson, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan to the country's more recent high-profile and media savvy canditates such as Ross Perot and Bill Clinton. This new edition covers such issues as the new forms of exposition created by cable television that so powerfully impacted the 1992 campaign. The wide variety of venues, including MTV and the Nashville Network, coupled with almost daily appearances on morning talk shows, afforded candidates the ability to reach audiences by the millions in "news-ads" that served as free extended commercials. Jamieson points out the success of Ross Perot's unconventional revival of the thirty-minute program spot--an important innovation that reflected both the power of the modern-day "infomercial" and marked a radical change in previously held notions about the viewing electorate's response to longer forms of candidate sponsored communication. Jamieson also addresses the increasing prevalence of "adwatchs," in which the press polices the fairness and accuracy of campaign accusations, offering the public a greater opportunity to assess the claims made in political ads, and giving opponents the enhanced ablitity to use news corrections in counter ads. And we see how campaign intrigue reached a new high with satellite tracking that allowed candidates to capture copies of ads as they went on the air. "We would put ads on the satellite that we weren't going to run," recalls Clinton campaign manager James Carville, "just to freak them out. Fake spots, so they would have to put some time and money together and respond to it." Just as political advertising is neither as innocent or invidious as it is frequently described, voters are more independent than cynics (and perhaps political advertisers) would like to believe. And as we approach the twenty-first century, with the cloak of television shadowing the country, voters are becoming increasingly more informed. As this fine study convincingly demonstrates, the successful "packaging" of presidents is a complex, and far from automatic, process..
Price: $16.35
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Campaigning for President
Based on the author's extraordinary personal collection of presidential election memorabilia, Campaigning for President tells the colorful story of how presidents (and their losing rivals) have wooed voters since America was founded. These objects—from posters and paper dresses to ice-cream bars, sunglasses, and (of course) buttons—form a fascinating, moving, sometimes funny, sometimes outrageous physical record of the past. Campaigning for President makes it clear that money didn't become important just in recent elections and that candidates—and their minions—have sometimes been willing to gloss over the fine points or get very creative in their self-representation in attempts to win the presidency. Full of entertaining stories about the elections and the memorabilia, this book provides wonderful insight into America's most important achievement—our democratic system. .
Price: $21.17
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