It’s vulgar to indulge in schadenfreude, which might be why I enjoy it so much. That’s my mood this morning as the man who launched a million Obamicons, Shepard Fairey, takes a break from “borrowing” other people’s work to complain about his onetime hero:
In an exclusive interview with National Journal on Thursday, Shepard Fairey expressed his disappointment with the president — a malaise that seems representative of many Democrats who had great expectations for Obama.
Fairey explained that when he came up with the poster in 2008, he was trying to find a single image that embodied the issues he cared most about — promoting health care, helping labor, and curtailing lobbyists. He likened the issues to projectiles.
“Looking at Obama’s standpoint on various policies, it was like, ‘Why throw all these particular projectiles over the wall… when I could put all those things in one projectile that I could hurl over the wall,'” Fairey said in a phone interview from Los Angeles, where he lives. “Obama was the delivery device in theory. Now, I realize that he maybe is not the correct delivery device, and I’ll just deal with those issues separately.”
You do that, Shepard Fairey! You deal with those issues separately. You throw those particular projectiles. It can’t be that your ideas don’t work. Those ideas just had the wrong delivery device. It’s not your fault you picked the wrong tool for the job!