Such branding has been ever present in politics, even before it was known by that name. Two exhibitions of election memorabilia currently on view in New York (“If Elected: The Game of American Politics” at the New York Historical Society, and “Campaigning for President” at the Museum of the City of New York) show how, for more than a century before the arrival of television and radio, names and slogans were slapped on any and every product with a scattershot incoherence. Buttons, badges, cigars, cigarettes, thimbles, ties, ribbons, razors, dresses, doorstops, stockings, suspenders, piggy banks, and pocket watches were all co-opted by campaigning presidential candidates in an attempt to create a public image for themselves.

It was not until 1840 and the candidacy of William Henry Harrison that the first glimmerings of an organized political marketing campaign could be spotted. A career soldier and member of the Whig party, Harrison was lampooned by rival Democrats for his provincial ways, and they declared that he would rather “sit in a log cabin and drink hard cider” than be in Washington, DC. It was a fatal error of judgment. Realizing that this criticism contained just the down-home qualities that would appeal to the electorate, the Whigs eagerly adopted the term log cabin. Miniature log cabins were carried at election rallies, hard cider was served at political meetings and, in a stroke of early cross-marketing genius, bottles of hard cider were made in the shape of log cabins.

This primitive form of branding is really not much different from that proposed by Nixon’s watershed campaign of 1968. The throwaway quality of early political merchandise (paper dresses, tin badges), and the forced alliteration (“We women want Willkie”) and second-grade rhymes (“With Henry Clay/We’ll win the day”) were all aimed toward creating an “impression” and conjuring knee-jerk enthusiasm rather than building support based on reasoned conviction. Furthermore, the tchotchkes established contact with the subconscious of the voter below the word level, purposefully eliding questions as to whether the candidate had the right skills for the job.

For all the talk in recent months about the modernity of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, he has hardly avoided these tried-and-true, centuries-old tactics. At his website you can buy Obama brand golf balls and umbrellas (but no eco-friendly onesies—those are available at John McCain’s online store). Indeed, when it comes to building Obama’s brand, no stone has been left unturned. Take Obama’s typeface, a font known as Gotham. Drawn from the street signs of midcentury New York, Gotham was invented in 2000 for GQ magazine and combines the modern with the nostalgic, the stylish with the manly. Its very inclusiveness seems aimed at those wavering at the political center. (If you believe this is overthinking the topic, consider that McCain’s chosen typeface—Optima—just happens to be the same as that used on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.)

Obama’s campaign logo—a sun rising over a field of red stripes— appears simple yet is packed with covert symbolism. The sun mimics the “O” of Obama, of course, but the rural image, the stripes that evoke a ploughed field, hark back to the 1930s and images of the Federal Art Project. Similarly, Obama’s watchwords—change, progress, hope— not only speak of the future but also recall the imperatives of Social Realism and the New Deal. Thus Obama’s brand is one that adopts the rhetorical dazzle and moral certainties that we associate with the past, while maintaining a resolutely contemporary feel. Most important of all, though, it feels right.

In his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), Daniel Boorstin, the late Librarian of Congress, coined the term pseudo-event to describe events such as press conferences and presidential debates that are manufactured solely to be reported. Yet he stresses, in defiance of Adlai Stevenson’s concerns, that our reliance on branding and false images “cannot—in contrary to highbrow clichés— accurately be described as a growing superficiality. Rather, these things express a world where the image, more interesting than its original, has itself become the original.”