The Audacity of Soap.

Marketers. Where there’s a popular personality, there’s a way to turn it into a profitable product. Our friend Ben and Silence Dogood were talking about this yesterday when we were visiting a huge flea-and-farmers’ market not too far from our rural cottage home, Hawk’s Haven. From the inside of the building, you’d have thought we’d stumbled into the Barack Obama Mall by mistake. Everywhere we looked—walls, counters, racks—it seemed our 44th President was looking back. There were Obama posters, Obama T-shirts, Obama commemorative coins, even—as Silence pointed out to me—Obama perfume bottles. No doubt if we’d stepped into the PEZ booth, we’d have been confronted with a presidential PEZ dispenser.

But unfortunately, we didn’t see a pair of Obama-themed products that we’d read about in our favorite news digest, The Week. One enterprising marketer is apparently selling soaps with names that are puns on President Obama’s bestselling book The Audacity of Hope. According to The Week, you can buy bar soap, The Audacity of Soap, or soap-on-a-rope, Hope on a Rope, which, and I quote, “retails in packs of eight emblazoned with Obama’s observation, ‘This is our moment to clean up America.’”

Silence and I got a kick out of the punning and would have enjoyed seeing the soaps for ourselves. Not that we would have bought them. I don’t know about you, but we find the thought of showering with the President way too up close and personal. Or should we say, audacious.

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