Last Tuesday a 25-year-old white student was wandering around Union Square in New York when she was set upon by four black teenage girls who pushed her, pulled out her earphones, and spat in her face. She was wearing a T-shirt proclaiming "Obama is my slave" that she had bought from Apollo Braun's Lower East Side store in Manhattan.
This isn't the first controversial T-shirt Braun has printed about the Democratic presidential hopeful, Barack Obama. His body of work includes such slogans as "Jews Against Obama", "Obama = Hitler" and "Who Killed Obama?" - which he told New York's Metro was his most popular yet.
When questioned about the message that he is putting out, Braun insists these are not his views but those of the rest of America. "For a lot of people, when they see Obama, they see a slave. People think America is not ready for a black president," he said. Not people like him, he says, insisting that Obama's race is "the only thing I like about him. He opens the door for other minorities" - but "ordinary Wasps", with whom, it turns out, Braun has more in common than he cares to admit. "I can't stand Obama," he says, comparing him to Hitler, because "he is a Muslim".
With the exception of Angela Merkel, riding high on folksy popularity, he will meet leaders (Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy) who are not much more popular than Bush. So Obama's arrival gives Europeans a chance to be passionate about politics - a feeling they have not had for a long time. In Obama, they pine for something they have singularly failed to produce - a politician who inspires them and a politics of hope.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/21/barackobama.uselections2008