President Barack Obama’s 500 Promises Deck, the new PolitiFact card set
July 22, 2009 at 5:30 am by Wayne Garcia
Thanks to a little internal housecleaning at Creative Loafing (I mean that literally, not in the figurative sense of firing folks), a copy of “President Obama’s 500 Promises Deck” showed up on my desk this week. The card deck — not quite a game — is a partnership between the St. Petersburg Times‘ Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact and U.S. Game Systems Inc.
The Deck features 500 campaign promises that Barack Obama made during his campaign and that PolitiFact is tracking after the president said, “I want you to hold me accountable.”
It has been on the market for several months, but it’s not tearing up the sales registers of America.
“I think it had a little bit of a problem finding its niche,” said Lynn Araujo, communications director for US Games Systems.
The cards don’t have a partisan slant; they merely recite one of the many campaign promises that candidate Obama made and invite card owners to go to PolitiFact’s online site to see an update on what progress President Obama has made on each pledge. They look like this:
But while that is pretty nonpartisan, apparently would-be buyers don’t see it that way.
“It’s intended to be neither [liberal or conservative], but it is being perceived as both,” Araujo told me in a telephone interview from US Games’ headquarters in Stamford, Conn. She cited the case of an African-America-focused bookstore that reviewed the card deck and told the manufacturer it viewed the cards as being against Obama, as they saw it as challenging Obama’s veracity. Conservative buyers, on the other hand, eschew the deck in the belief that it lifts Obama up for praise.
So if it neither left nor right nor an actual card game,
US Games intended neither as its target audience, and the $17.95 card deck (now available on Amazon.com and in some national chain bookstores) may be finding a better fit in school and educational uses. It has sold about 1,000 of the card decks so far after the company’s owner got the idea for it after seeing PolitiFact online.
The best use for “President Obama’s 500 Promises Card Deck” that I have heard to date, however, comes from the creator of PolitiFact, Times journalist Bill Adair, who wrote to me after I told him I was going to mention the new product:
Allow me to recommend to your readers what we’ve used them for here in the office: PolitiFact charades!
You randomly pick a card — say, Promise No. 309, Support regional innovation clusters — and then you have to silently act it out.
It’s a great a party game! And it’s educational too!
