PDs' Print Campaign is a Failure

The current crop of PD election material features the cartoons below. Following on from Simon’s accurate analysis of the battery imagery, not to mention the implicit fatalism of the Don’t Throw It All Away campaign, I have to say these fail to offer anything but the image of a party in the throes of desperation and impending failure.

Consider the above cartoon first with its depiction of the Greens, Labour and Sinn Fein as crocodiles. Leaving aside the strange use of tied-on labels to denote the parties, what is going on here? The unicyclist, whom we assume is the voter, carries a balance with wages and pensions tied either side. If anything these seem to be weighing him down and slowing his progress, hardly a PD message. Now the intended hook is that these are at risk from the Greens, Labour and Sinn Fein. So what are the PDs doing to help this struggling voter? Nothing, other than facelessly waving a placard that says “VOTE PD!” and obscuring the voter’s only way out of danger. The expression on the voter’s face says it all.

The second cartoon is even more ludicrous from a PD point of view. Micheal McDowell is leading a posse of the electorate across a dodgy bridge representing continued jobs growth. That in itself is a shaky metaphor for PD literature, if ironically quite accurate. The clincher for me is where he’s leading them and what it says above it: straight towards a bundle of dynamite with “VOTE PD!” writ large above it. The alternative coalition is waiting, poised with its hand on the plunger. McDowell is running straight towards his own destruction with the PD bloc of the electorate in tow.

I’m really left wondering two things: if this is a cartoonist who has very cleverly subverted his brief so that the PDs have essentially printed anti-PD material; and if anyone in PD HQ is actually looking at this stuff before it goes to press.