Obama and McCain have received endorsements from American Apparel. The Obama campaign doesn’t use American Apparel as their supplier of their swag though it is cool enough that it looks like American Apparel swag. And when we say swag, we mean… swag. Or maybe swank.
UPDATE: Commenter “ghostlawns” asks:
Forget the American Apparel ads for a minute.
One of American Apparel’s selling points has always been that their products are proudly made in the USA. The Obama endorsement is not surprising because he has stated that he would penalize companies that ship their jobs overseas.
I haven’t heard much about this from John McCain. Can anyone tell me where McCain stands on NAFTA? I’m not sure if McCain has clearly put out an America first policy when it comes to business.
I can’t quote him chapter and verse on NAFTA, but I can give you McCain’s stance on jobs vs. trade in a nutshell: “Those jobs are not coming back.” That said, I’m pretty sure he’d applaud AA’s business model — which is both astonishingly entrepreneurial and socially aware — if not the stances of the business’s models. AA has succeeded as a fair-wage, American-made company without the existence of the kind of penalties that Obama has talked about (that McCain would undoubtedly criticize), in part because they’ve cultivated an audience that’s happy to pay $22 for ten-square-inches of terry cloth. (In part thanks to those ads.) Is that the solution for every segment of the apparel industry? Do we want every segment of the apparel industry to have a manufacturing base here? Do we want all apparel ads to look like that? I look forward to American Apparel’s business strategy — and not its advertising one — being the basis for a question in a debate during the general.