Selling the president: Get your Obama hot sauce

last updated 8 January 2015

Can Barack Obama jump-start the economy? said Michael Phillips in The Wall Street Journal. In the vital sector of presidential memorabilia, he already has. The election of the nation’s first African-American president has set off an unprecedented “gold rush for knickknacks,” with companies large and small churning out not only the usual T-shirts and buttons but also such quirky mementos as Obama yo-yos, Obama hot sauce, Obama toilet paper, and Obama soap. Actually, collectors have a choice of soap, said Juliet Macur in The New York Times. Hand-washing purists can go with “The Audacity of Soap,” in standard bar format, but for the Obamaphile-on-the-go there’s “Hope on a Rope,” which retails in packs of eight emblazoned with Obama’s observation, “This is our moment to clean up America.”

I just wish Obama himself weren’t cashing in, said Chris Weigant in Huffingtonpost.com. Not only has his official Inauguration Committee been hawking commemorative designer handbags, it sold tickets to the ceremony itself for the ridiculous price—technically a “donation”—of $12,500 each. A grand total of 10—10!—tickets were set aside for the millions of ordinary, hardworking Americans who financed Obama’s campaign, while the rest were sold to corporate fat cats and movie stars. It’s all so … “well, gross,” said Charles Blow in NYTimes.com. With so much cash changing hands for “condoms and gym shoes and dolls and comic books,” all branded with Obama’s face, I think we’ve crossed the line from “memorializing his victory to trivializing it.”

But this is America, said Sarah Hepolah in Salon.com, and in America everything represents a commercial opportunity. We have a need “to acquire, to possess, to exploit” that which other nations might be content merely to witness and remember. Sometimes this results in tackiness—Obama votive candles, and, yes, even an Obama sex toy—“but in this endless stream of merchandise the tireless spirit of American entrepreneurialism is churning.” That doesn’t mean, however, that all these trinkets and geegaws are worth buying, said Larry Rohter in The New York Times. Since there are millions of them, the forces of supply and demand will diminish their value. Once these heady days are but a memory, and collectors try to sell their souvenirs, they may end up wishing they had the rarer mementos of less popular presidents: particularly, recommend the experts, “James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, and Warren G. Harding.”