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The Carter Campaign in Retrospect: Decoding the Cartoons

With the hindsight of Carter's phenomenal victory not only at the Democratic Convention, but also in the Presidential election, it is now easy to view his success as inevitable. During the spring of 1976, however, it was by no means obvious that Carter would be the winner, and cartoons produced during this period reflect the ambivalence of artists in interpreting the candidate to the public. Though political cartoons are frequently negative, inasmuch as they belong to the realm of visual satire, there are many degrees of negativity ranging from gentle irony to angry condemnation. (To be sure, some cartoonists drew approving or at least neutral pictures of Carter at this time, and the victories in July and November brought out more positive views of the new President, as would be expected after any race in which the underdog reaches the goal first despite tremendous handicaps.) The cartoons that appeared during the spring campaign of 1976 are peculiarly negative, revealing Carter as a 'foreigner' and therefore an anomaly among the other candidates. The South has been terra incognita to much of the nation for more than a century, and the suspicions and fears of some of our most prolific cartoonists are revealed in the depictions of the Georgia peanut farmer who couldn't possibly become President. What follows is an analysis of certain key cartoons, with the purpose of testing a theory of interpretation. Cartoons belong to a genre that lends itself to analysis by an approach through semiotics, for the following reasons: (1) Umberto Eco says that sign-codes must be able to lie, and cartoons are traditionally distorted and therefore to a degree mendacious.