Running in the Shadows in Campaign 2000

Abstract

Editorial cartoons contribute to candidate image development by offering condensed and simplified metaphoric portrayals. This study identifies the rhetorical fantasia advanced by cartoonists in their metaphors about Al Gore and George Bush through five themes of leadership during the early months of Campaign 2000: character, competence, viability, independence, and charisma. The cartoons reflected overall campaign strategies by attaching character issues to Gore and competence issues to Bush. However, the campaign was over-shadowed by the outside influence of preceding presidents, calling into question the independence of the candidates, which may have fueled the ambivalent results of the election.

Negative accounting stereotype: Enron cartoons

“…Within the frame, an editorial cartoon usually comprises two distinct levels: one is imaginary stories about a make-believe world, while the other, the referent, refers to real-life events and characters. This dichotomy has been referred to as a process of fantasia (Edwards, 2001). The frame’s compositional power lies in its simplicity but possesses enough complexity to be applicable to a wide variety of subjects while subtle enough to withstand and accommodate frequent visual distortions and alterations.…”

Drawing the Foreign Rivalry: Depiction of Indo-Pak Relations in Political Cartoons of Mainstream Pakistani and Indian English Newspapers (2014-2017)

“…It has been observed that five leadership themes including character, competence, viability, independence, and charisma were mostly depicted in the political cartoons for image building of presidential candidates. It has also been found in such studies that during campaign cartoonists highlight candidates' political activities while during their presidential tenure the cartoonists focus on policy matters (Conner, 2005;Edwards, 2001, Palmer, 2011.…”

Why are you amused: Unveiling multimodal humor from the prototype theoretical perspective

“…It is concluded that humour in metaphor-based nominal compounds is produced by recognition and appropriate resolution of the incongruity between the source and the target domains of metaphor on the one hand, and the literal and the figurative meanings of the compound on the other (Kang 2016: 376). Apart from verbal metaphor, visual metaphor is attested to be one of the most common humour mechanisms in cartoon drawing (Templin 1999: 21;Edwards 2001Edwards : 2142El Refaie 2003;Plumb 2004;Tsakona 2009). The elements come from different domains and there is a likelihood that they may be incongruous to one another and thus result in the creation of humorous effect (Tsakona 2009(Tsakona : 1180.…”