ABSTRACT
The election Abraham Lincoln won was held on November 6th, 1860. He obtained 39.7 per cent of the popular vote and became the sixteenth President of the United States. Despite the emancipatory heuristics of the Lincoln Presidency then, the Emancipation Proclamation has also been critiqued in the contextual framework of a pragmatic set of formulas devised in response to a precise geo-political moment. Barack Hussein Obama was a 'newcomer' to the national political scene; a fact presented as his greatest asset in a cultural climate of assumed political cynicism on the part of an already bipartisan electorate. As a semiotic communicative construct, the multiple reproduced frontal images of Obama on this set is unusual by early 21st Century standards; the transparency of its application of techniques thoroughly deciphered and theorized some fifty years earlier is seen as too obvious for a contemporary visually literate audience.
