Forget the jilbab.
The most noticeable change in the way candidates presented themselves during the recent Indonesian presidential campaign wasn’t necessarily with the wives, but with the men. After most Indonesian candidates in the previous legislative election presented their public face in true Javanese and reserved tradition, 2009 was a watershed moment in terms of how campaigns communicated publicly, positioned themselves in the media, adapted new technologies to spread their ideas and used images to tell their stories.
I’d written previously about the images of legislative candidates. Now check out the official sites of SBY and Megawati. They’re flash. They’re on Facebook. They photos are telling me something about them – immediately.
And they’re finally smiling in all their campaign posters.
