During the 2008 presidential election, baseball card manufacturer Upper Deck produced a series of election cards featuring candidates Barack Obama and John McCain in the exaggerated illustrations of a caricaturist. In one such card, a worried-looking Senator McCain dons the gear of a baseball catcher while attempting to block his opponent from sliding into home plate. His opponent, of course, was Senator Obama, whose attempted ‘steal’ of home evoked the legacy of baseball pioneer, Jackie Robinson. To make the association clearer, Obama’s picture on the card shows him wearing Robinson’s familiar number 42 Brooklyn Dodgers jersey. Baseball fans would understand the reference immediately, as Robinson’s successful steal of home against the New York Yankees in the 1955 World Series is among the game’s most iconic moments.

The Upper Deck card was one of the many references during the 2008 campaign that compared Barack Obama’s candidacy with the baseball legend. Political cartoonist J. D. Crowe’s image, ‘Obama #44,’ depicts the president-elect sliding just as Robinson had, right arm raised with a clenched fist, left hand trailing in the dirt, cap flying off his head. The captions – “The Jackie Robinson of Politics” and “Barack Obama Elected Nation’s 44th President” – are punctuated by the jersey. Although it clearly has the familiar colors and design of a Brooklyn Dodgers jersey, the details have been changed so that ‘Dodgers’ is replaced by ‘Obama’ and the number 42 has been replaced by 44. Another cartoonist, R. J. Matson, made a similar connection by drawing an ‘Obama 44’ jersey next to a Jackie Robinson and Barack Obama on equal terms, as rhetorical expressions of a particular kind of triumph in U.S. history.

What Crowe and Matson presented in images, countless others expressed in words. From journalists to political pundits, Barack Obama’s success was frequently attributed to the legacy of not only Jackie Robinson, but to athletes such as Muhammad Ali and Tiger Woods as well. As sportswriter George Vecsey declared, “There is a direct line from Jackie Robinson to Barack Obama.” British sportswriter Simon Barnes agreed, concluding that, “Barack Obama owes it all to Tiger Woods.