Presidential campaign slogans: we’ve come to know them, love them, loathe them, and in some cases, completely forget them. Some slogans, like Warren G. Harding’s “Cox and Cocktails,” sound perplexing in hindsight. Others, like Jimmy Carter’s “Not Just Peanuts” slogan, seem sweetly naïve thirty years later. And then there’s President Obama’s new slogan, simply “Forward.” What does it mean? Kathleen Hall Jamieson specializes in political language and rhetoric. She’s a professor of communications and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
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