Mitt Romney

During the 2008 and 2012 electoral cycles, the music preferences of presidential candidates became the subject of endless commentary, critique, and consternation. While “a little musical priming,” to use Irving Berlin’s words, has been par for the course at least since the 1840s, candidates have increasingly relied on thoughtfully curated playlists of pre-existing songs in various campaign contexts, both live and online. Campaign playlists in their many manifestations function as a form of social currency for those who create, listen to, and share music in the twenty-first century. This article investigates the functions of the list in music and music-related discourses, as well as the cultural work lists can perform during campaign season. After providing a handful of examples from early twenty-first-century campaigns to illustrate these functions, I turn to Mitt Romney’s and Barack Obama’s use of playlists in 2012, focusing on Spotify and the public’s reception to their respective engagements with music-sharing communities. To conclude, I consider the ways in which the campaign playlist serves as a tool for political communication, mobilization, and participation, and ponder its changing function in the 2.0 world.

Presidential elections are central to US culture, shaping the nation’s exceptionalist imagina-tion and global influence. This volume is the first to establish an interdisciplinary platform for a broad investigation of election mechanics and legacies. Exposing a blind spot in the con-tested definitions and periodizations of American cultural history, leading and emerging histo-rians, political scientists, literary critics, and cultural theorists shed light on what separates successful campaigns from electoral failures in the tug of war between fair representation and manipulative tactics.
Beginning with the struggle for voting rights and extending to current representations of candidates and campaigns from Lincoln to Obama, Electoral Cultures examines elections as complex cultural phenomena inseparable from social, economic, and demographic rela-tions. The contributors assemble a vast archive that includes visual narratives and rhetorics of persuasion, life writing, fiction, drama, film, and new media. Taken together, their chapters query assumptions about democracy in the United States that manifest themselves in strate-gies of self-fashioning and decision-making, political partisanship, culture wars, as well as citizen involvement in or apathy toward electoral contests.
The resulting survey breaks down disciplinary boundaries to not only remap the field of American cultural studies, but also significantly alter how we contend with the paradoxical American ideals of equality, individualism, and authenticity in the twenty-first century. Through its sweeping scope and rich detail, the volume opens up an incisive new scholarly agenda concerned with US political culture and its place in the world today. Along with scholars and students of American studies, general readers interested in the impact of elec-tions on US domestic and foreign policy will find here a valuable guide to the machinery and mysteries of electoral campaigns and their representations in mass culture.

The Tea Party is an contemporary American political movement that combines elements of mainstream Republican ideology, such as support for the War on Drugs and lowering taxes; libertarianism, such as drastically shrinking the state and opposing the unionization of workers; and anti-immigrant, pro-Medicare/Social Security populism to form a political nexus that has not been seen before in American political history. From the movement’s “birth” in 2009 to today, the Tea Party has had an active role in changing American politics, particularly in the 2010 congressional elections and the 2016 presidential election. With Tea Party backing, 44 congressional candidates won election in 2010, including 5 Senators, 4 Senators in 2012, and multiple Governors between 2010 and 2016. Despite the end of the House’s Tea Party Caucus and with only a few dozen still in Congress, the Tea Party has reshaped the Republican Party, facilitating a rapid shift in American conservatism and propelling Donald Trump to the White House.
In this paper, I will analyze the factors that led to the rise of the Tea Party, their political ideology and stances, the makeup of their voting bloc, their connection to organizations that are openly bigoted and hostile to the federal government, an analysis of several of prominent Tea Party politicians, how the bloc of Tea Party voters contributed to the popularity surge for 2016 Republican candidate Donald Trump, and how the Tea Party’s bloc of voters influenced the Trump presidency while their tactics influenced the anti-Trump Resistance.

The 2012 U.S. presidential election provided an opportunity for a team of scholars to undertake the first comprehensive study of music associated with a national political campaign. Already before the final selection of candidates in August/September, four academics had made plans to follow the musical path of the election battle as it unfolded, whatever the outcome in November. We divided the research tasks according to four major areas of musical deployment in recent presidential campaigns: music at the conventions (James Deaville), music in campaign advertisements (Joanna Love), user-generated, newly composed music on YouTube (Michael Saffle), and candidate and voter engagement with digital playlists (Dana Gorzelany-Mostak). The resulting four papers were presented in one session at the annual meeting of the Society for American Music (SAM) in March 2013 and then revised for publication in this forum. We opened the SAM panel with the above trailer, which reflects certain affinities between the paratexts of the cinematic trailer and the paratexts of campaign music with regard to history, content, and function. 2 In the present day, trailers precede the film as far as the public is concerned; they are a preview of coming attractions intended to cajole audiences into seeing and hearing their favorite celebrities, stories, or film genres on the big screen. However, when the cinema was in its infancy at the beginning of the twentieth century, trailers were exhibited at the end of the film rather than the beginning, which explains their designation. 3 In many cases, the trailer was actually a teaser that hinted towards what was in store for the protagonist of a serial film's next chapter. But hype represents only one function of the trailer. In its desire to aid the war effort, a committee of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry distributed trailers that advertised the sale of war bonds in 1917. While the silent trailers of this period tended to use standard cinematographic practices of the time and draw upon fairly obvious advertising tactics (including photoplay music in theaters), by the 1930s, sophisticated graphics and special effects, underscoring, and narration became commonplace as trailers were offered as transitional shorts between the multiple sound films screened on a given day. 4

Women and sexual minorities in the United States continue to experience subordinate status, and the policy gains they have made in areas such as reproductive rights and marriage equality continue to be challenged in political discourse. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of texts from the 2012 Democratic and Republican national conventions in order to examine the extent to which ideological representations of the family were employed to legitimize public policy positions related to gender (e.g., abortion) and sexuality (e.g., same-sex marriage). We analyzed two forms of text (official party platform document, transcripts of speeches) with distinct intended audiences (i.e., party members, general audience). Findings revealed that an ideological representation of the traditional family ideal—featuring a heterosexual couple, their children, and asymmetric gender relations—was present within speeches given by both parties, particularly by the spouses of the presidential candidat...

The Tea Party is an interesting political movement in contemporary America.  Combining populist fervor with elements of the mainstream Republican establishment, such as support for the War on Drugs and opposition to immigration, and some elements of libertarian ideology such as opposition to the unionization of workers, they form a political nexus that has not been seen before in American political history. From the movement’s “birth” in 2009 to today, the Tea Party has had an active role in changing American politics, particularly in the 2010 congressional elections. In this paper, I will analyze the factors that led to their rise, their political ideology and stances, the makeup of their voting bloc, their connection to organizations that are openly bigoted and hostile to the federal government, an analysis of several of prominent Tea Party politicians, and how they are contributing to the popularity surge for 2016 Republican candidate Donald Trump.

En las últimas elecciones presidenciales de Estados Unidos del 6 de noviembre de 2012, todos los analistas y expertos señalaban que el factor clave para la victoria del candidato demócrata, Barack Obama, o para la del republicano, Mitt Romney sería el voto hispano. Esa misma noche, con la publicación del recuento electoral, se corroboraba esta premisa: el voto de la comunidad hispana fue esencial para la reelección del Presidente Obama, quien consiguió el 71% de los votos de los hispanos, frente al 27% logrado por Romney.
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Jeffrey  Alexander  and  Bernadette  Jaworsky  examine President  Barack  Obama's  reelection campaign  against  GOP  nominee  Mitt  Romney  to  illustrate  the  importance  of  class  and  big money  in  the  contest  for  power  in  a  presidential  run-off.  On  what  base  is  Obama's  power founded?  How  could,  after  the  disastrous  loss  in  the  2010  congressional  elections,  Obama outplay  his  rival  against  all  odds  and  regain  the  White House  in  November  2012?    Both professors    attest    Obama    following    characteristics:    “Demonstrating    their    moral trustworthiness, successful political performers work furiously to push their opponents outside the world of civility into the immoral world outside”

Most of the US public opinion generally remembers the 80s as a successful decade, characterized by a great economic recovery and the victory in the Cold War at the expense of the Soviet Union. Those years came after the uncertain 70s, when the American weakness was particularly visible. Many authors use to describe the then-President, Ronald Reagan, as the leading “actor” of that patriotic renaissance. More than thirty years on, the ghost of the US decline is back. Mitt Romney, the Grand Old Party candidate for the presidential election to be held in November 2012, declared one of his main goals is to reverse this widespread perception. What is his perspective of the world politics? And, should he won the election, how would he act on the international stage to defend the US and Western interests around the globe? The article addresses these issues, focusing on the suggested historical parallelism between Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, and – as a consequence – between Reagan and Romney himself.