Custom shirts fit political brouhahas to a T

Sen. Barack Obama's remarks to San Francisco fund-raisers about bitter, small-town Pennsylvanians -- who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations" -- have contributed to the exponentially expanding political merchandising realm.

In the past few weeks, two bitter-inspired Obama T-shirts -- one pro, one con -- have cropped up in the aftermath of the controversy.

Obama supporters, peeved about the fallout from the "bitter" comments, have turned lemons into lemonade, creating a blog and a T-shirt, "Bitter Voters for Obama '08," available at www.cafepress.com/bittervoters.

"After the artificial controversy that emerged over Barack Obama's statements... I decided to start this blog, firstly as a place to vent my own frustration, then secondly as a place where the bitter of the world can come to explain why they are disenchanted with the government and these petty attack-reflex campaign tactics," says Jon Lachonis , a free-lance writer in Waterville, Maine, who started www.bittervoters.org.

"Heck, we can even talk about what we cling to when the going is tough. There's nothing wrong with having something to cling to, and Barack Obama identifying some of those things doesn't mean he thinks they aren't important."

People visiting the site kept asking for T-shirts. So, Lachonis decided to market them via CafePress. In addition to "Bitter Voters for Obama '08" T-shirts, there also are coffee mugs, beer steins, buttons and bumper stickers. T-shirts, available with only the slogan or the slogan and a silhouette of the candidate, cost $12 to $28.

Since November 2007, Obama products have accounted for 46 percent of CafePress' election merchandise sales, with Clinton products making up 19 percent and McCain products accounting for 3 percent.

More than 1.2 million Obama products are sold through CafePress, with 91 percent of sales being pro-Obama items and 9 percent of sales being anti-Obama items, said Marc Cowlin, spokesman for CafePress, which is based in San Mateo, Calif.

On the other side of the "bitter" political fence, Tennyson Hayes, a reader of conservative syndicated columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin, came up with the design for a "SNOBama" T-shirt, which reads, "Snob: It's an Elitist Thing, You Wouldn't Understand," with an image of Obama with an up-turned nose. It's available at www.AuthenticGOP.com for $20.

Malkin posted the SNOBama design to her blog, www.michellemalkin.com, then suggested it be marketed as a T-shirt and helped connect Hayes with AuthenticGOP.com.

Hayes created the image because he believes Obama thinks the American people don't know what's best for them.

"I don't want a president who regards American culture with elitist contempt," said Hayes, a designer from New York City. "I don't want a president who thinks ordinary Americans are too stupid to make their own decisions about their own lives. The cartoon is the short version of all that."

(E-mail L.A. Johnson at ljohnson(at)post-gazette.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)