By NBC’s Pete Carril
Just before last night’s debate, Gov. Mitt Romney’s personal aide tweeted a photo of the candidate tapping a sign reading “Clear Eyes, Full Heart, Can’t Lose”, superimposed over a Romney campaign “R.” While it’s not clear when the photo was taken, it could renew an argument with television executive Peter Berg. Berg, creator of the wildly popular high school football drama “Friday Night Lights” from which the slogan originates, requested that the Romney campaign stop using “Clear Eyes, Full Heart, Can’t Lose” to characterize their campaign. In a letter obtained by the Hollywood Reporter, Berg asks Romney to “come up with your own campaign slogan”, and adds “Your politics and campaign are clearly not aligned with the themes we portrayed in our series.”
This is not the first time that the Romney-Ryan ticket is being told to refrain from using the creations of others to characterize their political ideas or campaign beliefs. After Paul Ryan told the New York Times in August that he counts popular alternative-metal band “Rage Against the Machine” as one of his favorite artists, Rage guitarist Tom Morello responded by saying in a Rolling Stone Op-Ed that Paul Ryan “is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades.”
The top of the ticket was recently in a similar “stop-using-our-creations” scenario when his campaign took a liking to Silversun Pickups song “Panic Switch”, and began playing it at events. Guitarist Brian Aubert issued a statement similar to that of Berg’s, saying “We don’t like people going behind our backs, using our music without asking, and we don’t like the Romney campaign”. With only a handful of days left until the election, the candidate is working from a limited playlist, and on limited time.
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