Three books with posters that promoted Barack Obama for president of the U.S. last year have just been released:

• Hope: A Collection of Obama Posters and Prints by Hal Elliott Wert. With more than 170 posters (many little known) from Wert's collection and a foreword by Ray Noland, the street artist who created "The Dream." Wert is a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute.
• Design for Obama. Posters for Change: A Grassroots Anthology, edited by Spike Lee and Aaron Perry-Zucker, with an essay by Steven Heller. A selection of posters from  designforobama.org. Heller is Co-chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA Designer as Author Program and writes a column on visual design for the The New York Times Book Review. You can leaf through the book on the publisher's Web site.
• Art for Obama: Designing Manifest Hope and the Campaign for Change, edited by Shepard Fairey and Jennifer Gross. Fairey, of course, is the controversial street artist who created the most prominent image of Obama. This collection reportedly has many collages, paintings, photo composites, prints, and computer-generated designs, with many by little known artists, as well, but also posters by Ron English and Fairey.

Steven Heller, writing in his Daily Heller blog, has an interesting piece on posters to promote the Tea Party movement, as well as on anti-Obama designs (many of which are from The People's Cube Web site), which include Pelosi, Reid, and Obama as "The Three Stooges"; the "Tree of Liberty" symbol and the message "don't give me DEBT"; and Obama as "El Presidente of the Banana Republic of the United States."

Just as propaganda of the left can smear the opposition and distort positions, so, too, can propaganda of the right. As Heller states:

The transposition of Obama as a Soviet/Red...and the smearing of the Democratic party as Marxist...shows a decided lack of imagination and historical knowledge. First, socialism as a practice (i.e. Sweden) and Soviet Communism (remember the breakup of the Soviet Union) are quite different political beasts. Representing the Obama administration with the hammer and sickle is as stupid as smearing it with a swastika...Just as George W. Bush was not a Nazi for starting the Iraqi War, President Barack Obama is not a "commie-fascist" for advocating a government-subsidized health care plan.

Check out the poster designs on The People's Cube, and comment on the designs and messages.

Les Otten, a Republican running for governor of Maine (election to be held in 2010) has a logo that is similar to the very successful logo devised for Barack Obama last year.

It has the red-white-and-blue color scheme of the Obama logo, with green mountains and a leaf added. This makes a lot of sense in Maine, with its great natural resources. Check out Otten's Web site (also similar to Obama's), on which he advocates for the government to subsidize alternative energy options: http://lesotten.com/

[Thanks to Steven Heller, who discussed Otten's Web site on his blog, The Daily Heller, and to Laura Larrimore, who alerted me to Heller's blog entry]