Obama's new deal!

The New Deal is hailed as one of the greatest achievements of FDR and the ideals of Keynesian economics. However, many people refute that the New Deal was all that effective and some go so far as to say it actually prevented our recovery, held us back. These are arguable points for certain, but now, we are blindly moving forward based on the assumption that the New Deal worked and not giving any credence to those who claim otherwise. Those who do so are not just Republicans and conservatives, fyi. At any rate, the New Deal had a political symbol designed to let everyone know that a certain project or company was supporting the New Deal or receiving funds from it. That symbol looked like this:

Now, I go to the website for Obama's recovery effort, our new "New Deal" and see this banner:

Nice to know that imagery is still considered effective. In fact, I saw this image as well, purportedly to serve the same purpose as the original New Deal posters:

You'll see in these images some real similarities. After all, they serve similar purposes. The New Deal image is of an eagle, representing the great American eagle symbol we've all come to know, holding a cog in one talon and electricity in the other with the words "We do our part" across the bottom. This is clearly meant to get people on board with the New Deal by appealing to their baser instincts and desires to make America better. The second image is interesting. It uses the blue field of our flag to gain similar imagery as that of the eagle (I think this is less effective) and also uses a cog on one side representing as in the original image putting people to work. Finally, there is a leaf in a green background, a very common symbol for going green representing our changing over to a more green society, ironically away from the energy based imagery of the New Deal image. The really striking thing about this image though is not that it resembles New Deal imagery, that really is to be expected, but that it's circle shape and design clearly invokes imagery of the O stickers from the Obama campaign. So, this imagery goes a step further than FDR's image in that it actually tries to relate the image to the President, as opposed to America. Finally, we have the third image. It has similar themes to that of the other images, including the same negative issues I see in associating the entire thing directly with the President. However, there is one disturbing addition to this image, assuming it is really part of the program at all. That is the pointing hand coming out of a red background. While I'm sure this is meant to share imagery with uncle Sam and is supposed to have a similar effect as the "we do our part" words on the original image, suggesting the government wants "you" to do your part, again playing off the uncle Sam imagery, I did not get this as my first impression. Instead, my first impression was see an accusatory hand pointing at me and saying I was not doing my part, or worse yet, the image of someone from Soviet Russia or even the McCarthy era saying, "he is the one, he did it" when in fact there was no evidence to back it up. In other words, it struck me as a totalitarian/authoritative like image. So, all hail the new New Deal, if you don't, you're part of the problem. That's the political message I received from this. This imagery (propaganda) could have been so much better and so much more effective (see FDRs propaganda image above), instead, they just had to politicize it.