Artist Shepard Fairey designed the famous Obama ‘Hope’ poster that resonated with people around the world when Obama first ran back in 2008. That was before Obama OK’d routine NSA citizen surveillance and frequent unmanned drone strikes. It was so long ago, in fact, that some of the ‘hope’ was that Obama as president would close Guantanamo. Fairey, who’s got a show on MTV called Rebel Music, tells Esquire that Obama has hardly lived up to the hope. Fairey’s sympathetic to a degree — “Obama’s had a really tough time,” the artist said. “But there have been a lot of things that he’s compromised on that I never would have expected.” Which brings us back to the NSA and drones.
Obama’s opposition created its own version of the famous poster, of course. You could see plenty of them during his successful 2012 reelection campaign. Same image, but instead it said “NOPE.” Which looks like what the president will have to keep saying when anybody asks him if he closed Guantanamo yet.