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Dick Cheney, the hard-charging conservative who became one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in U.S. history and a leading advocate for the invasion of Iraq, has died at age 84.Cheney died Monday night due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family said in a statement.“For decades, Dick Cheney served our nation, including as White House Chief of Staff, Wyoming’s Congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President of the United States,” the statement said. “Dick Cheney was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing. We are grateful beyond measure for all Dick Cheney did for our country. And we are blessed beyond measure to have loved and been loved by this noble giant of a man.”The quietly forceful Cheney served father and son presidents, leading the armed forces as defense chief during the Persian Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush before returning to public life as vice president under Bush’s son George W. Bush.Cheney was, in effect, the chief operating officer of the younger Bush’s presidency. He had a hand, often a commanding one, in implementing decisions most important to the president and some of surpassing interest to himself all while living with decades of heart disease and, post-administration, a heart transplant. Cheney consistently defended the extraordinary tools of surveillance, detention and inquisition employed in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.Years after leaving office, he became a target of President Donald Trump, especially after his daughter Liz Cheney became the leading Republican critic and examiner of Trump’s desperate attempts to stay in power after his election defeat and his actions in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a television ad for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward.”In a twist the Democrats of his era could never have imagined, Dick Cheney said last year he was voting for their candidate, Kamala Harris, for president against Trump.A survivor of five heart attacks, Cheney long thought he was living on borrowed time and declared in 2013 he now awoke each morning “with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day,” an odd image for a figure who always seemed to be manning the ramparts.His vice presidency defined by the age of terrorism, Cheney disclosed that he had had the wireless function of his defibrillator turned off years earlier out of fear terrorists would remotely send his heart a fatal shock.In his time in office, no longer was the vice presidency merely a ceremonial afterthought. Instead, Cheney made it a network of back channels from which to influence policy on Iraq, terrorism, presidential powers, energy and other cornerstones of a conservative agenda.Fixed with a seemingly permanent half-smile detractors called it a smirk Cheney joked about his outsize reputation as a stealthy manipulator.“Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked. “It’s a nice way to operate, actually.” The Iraq War A hard-liner on Iraq who was increasingly isolated as other hawks left government, Cheney was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, without ever losing the conviction that he was essentially right.He alleged links between the 2001 attacks against the United States and prewar Iraq that didn’t exist. He said U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators; they weren’t.He declared the Iraqi insurgency in its last throes in May 2005, back when 1,661 U.S. service members had been killed, not even half the toll by war’s end.For admirers, he kept the faith in a shaky time, resolute even as the nation turned against the war and the leaders waging it.But well into Bush’s second term, Cheney’s clout waned, checked by courts or shifting political realities.Courts ruled against efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority and accord special harsh treatment to suspected terrorists. His hawkish positions on Iran and North Korea were not fully embraced by Bush.Cheney operated much of the time from undisclosed locations in the months after the 2001 attacks, kept apart from Bush to ensure one or the other would survive any follow-up assault on the country’s leadership.With Bush out of town on that fateful day, Cheney was a steady presence in the White House, at least until Secret Service agents lifted him off his feet and carried him away, in a scene the vice president later described to comical effect. Cheney’s relationship with Bush From the beginning, Cheney and Bush struck an odd bargain, unspoken but well understood. Shelving any ambitions he might have had to succeed Bush, Cheney was accorded power comparable in some ways to the presidency itself.That bargain largely held up.“He is constituted in a way to be the ultimate No. 2 guy,” Dave Gribbin, a friend who grew up with Cheney in Casper, Wyoming, and worked with him in Washington, once said. “He is congenitally discreet. He is remarkably loyal.”As Cheney put it: “I made the decision when I signed on with the president that the only agenda I would have would be his agenda, that I was not going to be like most vice presidents and that was angling, trying to figure out how I was going to be elected president when his term was over with.”His penchant for secrecy and backstage maneuvering had a price. He came to be seen as a thin-skinned Machiavelli orchestrating a bungled response to criticism of the Iraq War. And when he shot a hunting companion in the torso, neck and face with an errant shotgun blast in 2006, he and his coterie were slow to disclose that extraordinary turn of events.The vice president called it “one of the worst days of my life.” The victim, his friend Harry Whittington, recovered and quickly forgave him. Comedians were relentless about it for months. Whittington died in 2023.When Bush began his presidential quest, he sought help from Cheney, a Washington insider who had retreated to the oil business. Cheney led the team to find a vice presidential candidate.Bush decided the best choice was the man picked to help with the choosing.Together, the pair faced a protracted 2000 postelection battle before they could claim victory. A series of recounts and court challenges a tempest that brewed from Florida to the nation’s highest court left the nation in limbo for weeks.Cheney took charge of the presidential transition before victory was clear and helped give the administration a smooth launch despite the lost time. In office, disputes among departments vying for a bigger piece of Bush’s constrained budget came to his desk and often were settled there.On Capitol Hill, Cheney lobbied for the president’s programs in halls he had walked as a deeply conservative member of Congress and the No. 2 Republican House leader.Jokes abounded about how Cheney was the real No. 1 in town; Bush didn’t seem to min and cracked a few himself. But such comments became less apt later in Bush’s presidency as he clearly came into his own. Cheney’s political rise Politics first lured Dick Cheney to Washington in 1968, when he was a congressional fellow. He became a protégé of Rep. Donald Rumsfeld, R-Ill., serving under him in two agencies and in Gerald Ford’s White House before he was elevated to chief of staff, the youngest ever, at age 34.Cheney held the post for 14 months, then returned to Casper, where he had been raised, and ran for the state’s lone congressional seat.In that first race for the House, Cheney suffered a mild heart attack, prompting him to crack he was forming a group called “Cardiacs for Cheney.” He still managed a decisive victory and went on to win five more terms.In 1989, Cheney became defense secretary under the first President Bush and led the Pentagon during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War that drove Iraq’s troops from Kuwait. Between the two Bush administrations, Cheney led Dallas-based Halliburton Corp., a large engineering and construction company for the oil industry.Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of a longtime Agriculture Department worker. Senior class president and football co-captain in Casper, he went to Yale on a full scholarship for a year but left with failing grades.He moved back to Wyoming, eventually enrolled at the University of Wyoming and renewed a relationship with high school sweetheart Lynne Anne Vincent, marrying her in 1964. He is survived by his wife, by Liz and by a second daughter, Mary. Associated Press writer Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming, contributed to this report. Calvin Woodward, Associated Press
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Amid a crowded field of candidates, New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has managed to cut through the clutterwith a campaign poster that challenged every convention of visual design. New Yorkers found that the posters colors struck a chordMetroCard yellow, Mets blue, and nods to classic bodega signage. But a hasty glance could easily have missed just how deliberate every choice was, from typeface to shade to layout. In the most recent episode of the By Design podcast, Fast Company spoke with Tyler Evans, the designer who took Mamdani’s brand identitycreated by the creative studio Forgeand turned it into an instantly iconic campaign visual. Evans, currently the creative director for Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has also led design for the Teamsters and Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. His work tackles a question that lingers for many: why do so many campaign aesthetics fall flat with voters? And what should politicians do to break through? Over a conversation with Liz Stinson and Mark Wilson, Evans breaks down what makes design effective in modern politics, how visuals shape political perception, and the strategies behind his work on progressive campaigns. While design alone cant win elections, it plays a starring role in conveying identity and essence, especially in todays fast-moving landscape, where visual culture carries ever more weight amid shrinking attention spans. This conversation has been condensed and edited. Liz Stinson: I think we have to start with just a really simple question for people who might not understand what you do. Can you tell us what it is that a creative director on a campaign does? Tyler Evans: Design is the bread and butter bulk of it. That’s how I spend the majority of my time basically weighing in on anything that visuals touch, which in this day and age is the majority of things. How that came to be, um, really started with Senator Sanders. Not to immediately go back in time here but he always had a really crucial understanding of how visual aesthetics and design can influence politics.Granted his, some of his Senate digital aesthetics weren’t always the most polished. Mark Wilson: Bernie doesn’t hit me as a guy who’s really locked down on aesthetics and design. Its sort of surprising, but he always understood that there needs to be something out there to communicate to people. There’s always been like a multi-pronged strategy of communications, and that’s actually how I found out who he is and what his politics were, and how I became more in touch with my own politics. [On Occasio-Cortezs campaign] I also do social media. So in my day-to-day role, I also write social media posts, not for the congresswoman, but for an account called Team AOC. It’s myself and our photographer and we also have a videographer that we work with. LS: So what I’m hearing is that it’s not just a poster, it’s not just social media, it’s sort of this all-encompassing communication between the campaign and the people who you’re hoping to reach. Yeah, it’s just any way that we want to tell the story of the politics that we represent and any number of ways that can represent itself visually on the internet or not on the internet, honestly. LS: I want to frame up this conversation because we thought right now would be a really good time to talk to you because you had a small, but I would say very important role in the Zoran Momani campaign. You created the poster for Momani that I see everywhere, as someone living in Brooklyn. Its based on the branding work done by the team at Forge, which is really great. It has all of these visual callbacks to the city with like the MetroCard yellow and the Mets blue and the fire engine red. But I would really like to understand from a design mind why you think this brand and this poster in particular has been so successful? It took me going to New York once the poster was out there to kind of understand why people were vibing with it the way they were. To Forges credit and Aneesh, who did the whole brand suiteit’s kind of like a love language to like the bodega visual aesthetic. So there were references to the New York Post and their visual languages and their logo type. There were visual cues like hand lettering and the old school bodegas and how New York signage used to look when they would hire individual hand painted sign letterers. So there were all these old references, and I just kind of downloaded that and then put a little bit of like a Bollywood aesthetic in there with a nod to Z’s mom in there as well. And just kind of pushed that all together. There were like 12 drafts before it. Zohran was very involved in it. We all worked together on it, but, I think it just represents the city pretty well is the short answer. It just feels right in the windows. LS: What strikes me about this poster is that this does not look like any sort of political poster that I have seen in the past. There are some hallmarks of progressive politics that we can get into in a little bit, but to me, the reason this took off is because it’s totally unique. It speaks to the city as you just said, but it also feels like it’s an aesthetic object, too. MW: Its also kind of 3D, right? With that giant extrusion that really sucks you into it. And it makes me think that so much political branding is just flat. I was playing around a lot with this kind of approach in typography. His logo had a little bit of the drop shadow effect already, and I just kind of like, just really went overboard with like a maximalist extension of it…I was like, you know what, I’m just gonna throw this in here and they can tell me if its too much. But they loved it, and it draws the eye to Zohran. Because no one knew what he looked like or who he wasthat’s what he was struggling with at the time. He says it all the time now, but he was literally losing to or tied with someone else like the name someone else in the polls at the time. So he needed his name to get out there and people to know who he was. LS: When we were talking to Michael Beirut for our first episode, he was talking about the Obama logo and how that team was coming up with ideas for the visual identity [for the 2008 campaign].They presented him with something that felt a little bit too corporate in his mind. And the argument there, at least at that point in political history, was basically like, nobody knows who you are, so nobody’s going to confuse you for the corporate suit that’s running for office. What you need is something that signifies that you are trustworthy, you’re familiar, you people, you’re friendly, people can trust you. And, and I think it’s interesting that Mamdani was not a known quantity, and yet he sort of leaned into that as opposed to going in that corporate direction. I’m just gonna speak from personal experience, I’m really, really, really, really sick of the corporatization of visuals within politics, and especially within the Democratic brand of politics. I think it jst kind of tells you what you need to know about a candidate alreadyabout what they believe and what they stand for with what they say visually. If they look like a corporate logokind of tells you where they’re gonna be coming from, a far as where their money comes from or who they stand up for or who they’re with. If they look like a corporation, you just kind of know intrinsically, like, that’s probably not for me. LS: Do you really think that’s true that there’s a direct line between a corporate looking logo and where people get their money or where their heads are at? I mean, maybe not for the money thing, butyeah, I think people draw that link because like there’s, there was a period there where some logos I couldn’t tell you if it was a yoga studio or the guy running for governor or Congress. It was just like, who knows? It was sans serif typeface, slight gradient, and happy person off in the distance. MW: Is this a reason that so much of your work outside of Mandani leans towards retro aesthetics? Yeah, it really started with the 2020 Sanders campaign. We drew a lot of that from the LBJ presidential effort, and we kind of wanted to look for when was the last time the nation did and tried to do really huge things? And what was the visual language looking like when those efforts were enormous?… I always looked to the past for who’s already done it well, and then where can we take it? MW: Obviously Liz and I are big believers in design and the ability for design to make an impact. You mentioned earlier how Mamdanis poster really brought him to prominence in a way he hadn’t been. But I am curious how much you think design can sort of move the needle with politics. Rewinding to our conversation with Michael Beirut, I had asked him if he felt his logo for Hillary, which was incidentally very corporate, cost her the campaign. His conclusion was no, we don’t really have that much power. But I feel like based upon everything you’ve said, you feel like maybe there is more impact design can make I don’t think it has that much power, but I do think it has power. Given the right time and the right space, like it’s very much like the stars have to be aligned. But if the visual is right and it lands in the right moment, at the right time and all the things up to that point are visually aligned, then yeah, absolutely it can do the right thing. But its just part of the communications toolbox. It’s not gonna win the whole thing, but like, it’s definitely gonna help a whole lot. I think that visuals definitely speak a shorter language or simpler language than a lot of these other pieces of media that campaigns are putting out. Like for all the attention that video gets, they still take three minutes. Not everyone’s wearing their headphones on the train or some people are driving and they’re gonna miss that tweet because it’s gone and the algorithm is hiding it anyway because who, who lets left wing tweets get up there anymore? But, you know, maybe they saw this meme because it’s on Reddit, or like, it can travel in a way that video can’t. In the spirit of like all of these weird platforms that were on these days, you just have to put your message everywhere and design has to be a part of that. MW: It has to make some difference, especially in a highly visual culture. But some people on sort of the liberal end of the equation doubt it because weve just been so bad at it for a while, right? Theres no doubt that the MAGA hat has benefited the Right as a really powerful sort of design statement that has coalesced the message behind one powerful identity. I don’t know that I’m in the minority, but I’m definitely of the opinion that Donald Trump’s branding is actually quite good. They know their audience. I’m not saying I love it, but does it work? Is it effective? Does it do what they’re trying to do? Yeah, it does. Every step of the way. It pisses people off. It sings to the people it’s trying to sing to, and that’s what they’re trying to do. So they know what they’re doing. Those hats sold like crazy. And with every person who impersonates them and makes a blue version with a counterintuitive message on it, they’re just solidifying their message even further. LS: One question I have is, what is the Trump brand though? Because sure, it’s the MAGA hat, but it doesn’t really say Trump on there, right? And that’s so powerful because other people get to claim it as their own. It’s their movement. It’s not just Trump’s movement. It’s, it’s for, for anyone who sort of buys into that perspective. Does the left have anything like that? The seeds of anything that powerful, that uniting? No, not yet. I think there have been people to try, but it just hasn’t happened. LS: And why do you think that is? You know, I think there’s an aversion to to commercialism. There’s an aversion the capitalist impulse that Trump has. Because Trump started selling those hats to make money, you know; it wasn’t to build a movement. It just so happened that his movement was called Make America Great Again. And he was selling hats that had it on there, and he was making money hand over fist on it. And then a whole bunch of people took it and started selling hats too. And he is like, all right, cool. LS: [Mamdanis] For a New York you can afford is such a good phrase if you generalize that a little bit. You don’t have the acronym potential there, but you do have a slogan, right? What would it take for the left to find its version ofI don’t wanna say the MAGA hat, but just like this central idea or ideology? Not to like skip back a foot here, but Make America Great again is not original to Trump. It was Ronald Reagan’s first. And so if, if you want to unlock the potential on the Democratic side, I think you kind of have to do what Sanders has been doing, what Ocasio-Cortez has been doing, what Mamdani is doing and just get back to the roots. Like go back to the roots of the Democratic party and fight for working people. And I think that’s where you’ll unlock your full potential. And I think that’s where the Democrats have lost their way; the rest will follow is when the politics start first.
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E-Commerce
After a double-digit loss in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, Andrew Cuomo launched his independent bid for the office in June with a video mimicking the style of his primary adversary, Zohran Mamdani. Since then, his campaign seems to have taken most of its cues from the pairs supposed common adversary, President Donald Trump. Throughout his run, Cuomo has used AI slop in attack ads every bit as disgraceful as the worst of Trumps Truth Social feed, while flirting with the kind of fearmongering and bigotry that have colored Trumps entire political career. Its a questionable choice in a campaign filled with questionable choices. The former governors closing argument seems destined to be clarifying for any voters still on the fencejust not in the way he hopes. While Mamdani made a splash throughout the primary by campaigning heavily, cutting social-ready videos, and hammering a message of affordability, Cuomo appeared to sleepwalk through the race. He held relatively few events, didnt speak to many reporters, and clung to an outdated message of public safety. In April, he released a 29-page, typo-ridden housing plan with a footnote referencing ChatGPT. (In response, the campaign claimed they only used ChatGPT for research, leaving them open to charges of outsourcing important policy to AI.) It was as if Cuomo hoped name recognition and a foggy collective memory around why he left the governors office would propel him to victory. He certainly seemed surprised when it turned out New Yorkers might indeed harbor some reservations about a candidate tainted by more than a dozen credible sexual harassment allegations and a peak COVID-era nursing home scandal. Clearly, he needed to try something new. The general-election playbook was somehow worse, with Cuomo mostly making waves for the videos his campaign posted that were generated by AI and designed to stoke fear and bigotry. One thing nobody can accuse him of in the general race is lacking sustained, sweaty effort, which translated into some of the dirtiest, most AI-heavy campaigning the country has seen so farat least, from someone who isn’t Donald Trump. A festival of fearmongering and bigotry Cuomo started out in the general election with a campaign of cringe, loaded with clumsy stabs at humor, including Office memes. The end stretch has seen Cuomo pivot from his usual attacks on Mamdanis policies and lack of experience to more fear-driven, identity-based tactics against the frontrunner, who would be the first Muslim mayor of New York City. Cuomo also did not denounce blatantly Islamophobic attacks against Mamdani, including an October 23 ad from the Cuomo-supporting For Our City PAC, which placed the words Jihad on NYC over Mamdanis smiling face. But the nadir of the campaign had actually come a day earlier. On October 22, Cuomo tweeted and quickly deleted an AI-generated mock ad from a group called Criminals for Zohran Mamdani. (The ad lives on in Instagram clips and elsewhere.) It starts with an uncanny-valley Mamdani eating rice with his handsa common custom in Uganda, where Mamdani was born, which his more xenophobic critics have deployed to fearmonger based on his perceived foreignness. The ad then features a procession of criminals, including a man who bears a striking resemblance to actor Idris Elba donning a keffiyeh to do some shoplifting. After predictable backlash, Cuomos campaign quickly blamed the ad on a junior staffer, claiming it was released by accident. The same day For Our City released the “Jihad” ad, Cuomo turned a guest spot on radio host Sal Rosenbergs show into a lightning rod for toxic publicity when he raised the question of how Mamdani might handle another 9/11. The host suggested Mamdani would be cheering in this hypothetical scenario, a wildly insulting attack many critics alleged crosses a line. Cuomo didnt merely let the claim go unchallenged; instead he added, Thats another problem, before circling back to the more general bedlam that might result from Mamdani presiding over the city during such a crisis. Cuomo has since acknowledged that Rosenbergs comment was offensive, but still insists that nobody is attacking [Mamdani] for being Muslim. Meanwhile, even the Republican candidate in the race, Curtis Sliwa, has weighd in against Cuomos characterization of the interview. (Andy, get your big boy pants on, he said of Cuomo. When you go on a talk radio program and you say something, own it. Own it.) Ultimately, what Cuomos much-criticized radio interview accomplished is handing Mamdani an opportunity to open up, finally, about the Islamophobia he has encountered during this race, and throughout his life. His video on the topic was viewed 25 million times on X alone. Ramping up the AI As offensive as it was, the “Criminals for Zohran” ad was just one of several missteps in Cuomo’s full-blown embrace of Trumpian AI in attack ads in the final stretch of the campaign. While the AI slop in the presidents Truth Social feed has long since infected the rest of his administrations weirdly meme-filled social output, its a new development for the mayoral race in New York City. The AI usage began inoffensively enough, with an October 1 ad depicting Cuomo performing various jobs throughout the city. He stars as a window washer, a subway conductor, and a theater grip; all to demonstrate the NYC jobs he knows hes not suited for as a way to underscore his preparedness to run the city. Although his AI smile in the ad is as strained as the real one, the clip is more clever than much of the campaigns previous output. He didnt stay in this lane for very long. On October 21, Cuomo released a trollish ad using AI to render Mamdani as a Mini-Me to former Mayor Bill de Blasios Dr. Evila youth-courting reference to Austin Powers, the last installment of which came out 23 years ago. Although it may have been jarring to see a candidate other than lame-duck Eric Adams depict Mamdani using AI, the Mini-Me ad came across as more pathetic than offensive. It ended up being a warmup for the Criminals for Mamdani ad the next day. The wide criticism Cuomos AI ads have generated has not deterred the candidate from releasing more of them. Last week, he released a Schoolhouse Rock-style clipfinger on the pulse as everwhich attracted attention for featuring a legislative bill that appeared to be pregnant. The ad also stood out for attributing claims about Mamdanis voting to ChatGPT. Finally, Cuomo released a trick-or-treating themed ad on Halloween, featuring an AI likeness of Mamdani going door-to-door wearing the scariest costume of allsocialist. If Cuomo has any qualms about a political future in which candidates use AI to literally put words in each others mouths, they are not evident at this time. The desperation of imminent defeat Cuomo isnt the only NYC mayoral candidate who posted a video on HalloweenMamdani did, too. Instead of AI-based fearmongering, though, his video featured the candidate out in the streets interviewing trick-or-treaters. (The caption? Its scary how cute Park Slope was tonight.) This post is reflective of a campaign that has remained focused on positivity and affordability more than mudslinging, although the candidate has landed some tremendous dunks along the way. Theres a reason Cuomo has apparently opted for the dark side at the end of his campaign. Its because his tortured-smile, Man of the People act at the beginning did not resonate. Neither did much else, for that matter. The biggest bump in his polls throughout the election cycle came after Adams dropped out in September, and it still left him underwater by double digits. Cuomo is leaning on Trumpian AI, fear, and bigotry because hes desperate. And anyone that desperate to win shouldnt be trusted to leadleast of all under a Trump presidency. Cuomo keeps insisting hes the last person Donald Trump wants to see as mayor, even though that is objectively untrue. Cuomo reportedly courted Trumps endorsement and as of this past weekend, he apparently got it. If Cuomo truly were the last person Trump wanted to see as mayor, though, it would be only because Trump might hate to see someone win an election by so blatantly stealing his shtick.
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