Life of Julia Parodies

Submission 43,707

Part of a series on 2012 United States Presidential Election. [View Related Entries]

About

Life of Julia Parodies are spoof images based on the "Life of Julia" campaign, a slideshow published by Barack Obama's reelection campaign that illustrated the life of a faceless woman. The original video, which juxtaposed Julia’s life under Obama’s presidency against what it would be like under the Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, soon became a target of online parodies critiquing the slideshow’s one-sided logic.

Origin

On May 3rd, 2012, the Obama re-election campaign team released a slideshow titled "The Life of Julia"^[1], which went through the life of a faceless female character with the government providing assistance for her at every point in her life. The slideshow was immediately criticized by political media outlets including news aggregator Breitbart^[2], who was the first to parody the page by providing an alternative life story of a real person named Julia.

Spread

On May 3rd, 2012, Twitter users also began critiquing the slideshow with the hashtag #Julia.^[3] Politico^[4], the Guardian^[11], the HIll^[14] and Jezebel^[15] quickly gathered the best tweets from this feed and published them on the same day. Additionally, a handful of image parodies popped up with TheLifeOfJulia.com^[5] creating a similar interactive slideshow to show an alternative view of her life under Obama's presidency. Politics-focused personal blog Sooper Mexican^[6] published a series of photoshopped versions the original slides, painting the Mitt Romney world as more ideal.

Also on the day, the release of the slideshow was covered by political news media sites including the Atlantic^[7], National Review Online^[8], the Huffington Post^[9]^[10], the Washington Post^[12] and Breitbart^[13], who called it the “Dads are Unnecessary, Single Women are Helpless” campaign. The next day, the Foundry at Heritage.org published A Better Life for Julia^[17], fact-checking the original slideshow's story. It was also covered on CBS News^[16] and the MSNBC Morning Show that day.

In the following days, the site and its parodies was discussed on the Daily Beast^[18], who stated that despite the criticism, the site had already racked up over 37,000 likes on Facebook, and parodied again on Oregon Live.^[19]