I'm saying that I take the campaign slogan "hope and change" as a direct insult. It is such an egregiously pie-in-the-sky slogan that, in my mind, anyone proposing it should have instantly become a laughingstock, just as if they'd proposed the slogan "we're for good things, but against bad things".
1. A statement of some sort of policy goal ("Peace and Prosperity"; "Defeat the new deal and its reckless spending")
2. The candidate's name (incredibly common)
3. An achievement ("He kept us out of war"; "Four more years of the full dinner pail")
4. An attack on the other guy ("Roosevelt for ex-president"; "Are you better off than you were four years ago?")
5. Meaningless fluff ("Building a bridge to the twenty-first century"; "A time for greatness")
Some slogans can fit into multiple categories to varying degrees; "Roosevelt for ex-president" is a substance-free attack, while "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" is making a fairly identifiable complaint.
"Hope and change", obviously, goes in category five. But it's phrased as if it were in category one. The meaningless fluff is usually along the lines of "U-S-A! U-S-A!" (or "The candidate is great!"), which is hard to find offensive. I parse "hope and change" as something like an intentional bait-and-switch, except that it's a one-phase process ("we'll tell them something meaningless, but they'll think we have a plan!") instead of a two-phase process ("we'll tell them we have a plan, and then later we'll tell them we were never going to use that plan").
Looking over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._presidential_camp... , there seem to be a few standard types:
1. A statement of some sort of policy goal ("Peace and Prosperity"; "Defeat the new deal and its reckless spending")
2. The candidate's name (incredibly common)
3. An achievement ("He kept us out of war"; "Four more years of the full dinner pail")
4. An attack on the other guy ("Roosevelt for ex-president"; "Are you better off than you were four years ago?")
5. Meaningless fluff ("Building a bridge to the twenty-first century"; "A time for greatness")
Some slogans can fit into multiple categories to varying degrees; "Roosevelt for ex-president" is a substance-free attack, while "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" is making a fairly identifiable complaint.
"Hope and change", obviously, goes in category five. But it's phrased as if it were in category one. The meaningless fluff is usually along the lines of "U-S-A! U-S-A!" (or "The candidate is great!"), which is hard to find offensive. I parse "hope and change" as something like an intentional bait-and-switch, except that it's a one-phase process ("we'll tell them something meaningless, but they'll think we have a plan!") instead of a two-phase process ("we'll tell them we have a plan, and then later we'll tell them we were never going to use that plan").