Campaign slogans

"Tippecanoe and Tyler Too."

"In your heart you know he's right."

"Yes, we can."

Those are three of the most famous presidential campaign slogans in United States presidential campaign history. The first - Tippecanoe and Tyler Too - was from the 1840 campaign of William Henry Harrison (Tippecanoe) and his running mate, Martin Tyler. In many ways Harrison ran the first modern presidential campaign, and his catchy campaign slogan is evidence of that much. Sadly for Harrison, he couldn't make good on many of his campaign promises as he died after just thirty days in office after contracting pneumonia at the inauguration.

The best example of competing presidential campaign slogans comes from the 1964 presidential campaign in which the incumbent, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was running against republican Barry Goldwater. Johnson, a tough talking Texan with a progressive streak, had been vice president under John F. Kennedy (who himself had no true campaign slogans in 1960) and took over as commander in chief when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

Johnson's campaign slogans were many and varied at first for the 1964 election, but eventually he settled upon "The stakes are too high for you to stay at home." It was one of the all time brilliant campaign slogans, mixing the right amount of alarmist "get out the vote" urgency, with a bit of slandering of the opposition, with just the right amount of pandering to the populace - as in, "we know if you vote, you'll vote for us."

Goldwater, the arch-conservative lunatic, went with "In your heart you know he's right." Goldwater's campaign slogan was a plea toward the baser, tribal instincts in all of us. He ran on a platform of war against both the Soviet Union as well as war against the United States' working class. This was the height of the cold war, and Goldwater wanted to get the people behind him and make the cold war hot - go toe-to-toe with the russians, mutually assured destruction be damned.

Fortunately for him, it turned out in the end that the people chose Johnson and nobody ended up giving the keys to the world's largest nuclear arsenal to a madman.

The most recent notable of the presidential campaign slogans was Barack Obama's "Yes, we can!" Unlike either Johnson or Goldwater, he appealed to the hope for a better world in all of us rather than the fear of a worse world. He used that slogan and several others - including "Change we can believe in" - to become the first african american to win the presidency.