SCOTT SIMON, host:
This year's State of the Union address came with a catchphrase.
President BARACK OBAMA: That's how we'll win the future. But if we want to win the future - and winning the future - the future is ours to win.
SIMON: The Obama team has a lot of experience with political slogans - change we can believe in, a huge hit. So was yes we can. Other promises, like recovery summer, failed. NPR's White House correspondent Ari Shapiro reports on whether win the future is a winner.
ARI SHAPIRO: Dan Balser runs the advertising department at the Creative Circus School of Advertising and Graphic Design. When I emailed him to see if he would talk with me for this story, I used the subject heading: Win the future. He later told me he almost deleted the message without reading it.
Mr. DAN BALSER (Advertising Department Head, Creative Circus School of Advertising and Graphic Design): My initial reaction as a consumer was I quickly ignored it. And then I started looking at it, OK, why did I ignore it?
SHAPIRO: He finds the phrase too thin - too amorphous. He's not sure what the president wants him to do. But he says there's hope for it.
Mr. BALSER: To me it reminds me of let's roll. It kind of gets into a rallying cry that is universal to Americans and it isn't either on the left or the right.
SHAPIRO: Win the future is not a new phrase. Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich titled his 2005 book, "Winning the Future." During last year's World Cup, the advertising firm Wieden and Kennedy coined the slogan, write the future for Nike.
Mark Fitzloff is Wieden and Kennedy's executive creative director. He likes win the future. He says it has teeth.
Mr. MARK FITZLOFF (Executive Creative Director, Wieden and Kennedy): It's certainly optimistic and bright and shiny, but it's also aggressive and competitive. And I think that in that way it's a slight shift from yes, we can, which in some ways is defensive in nature and certainly not combative.
SHAPIRO: Win the future sets up a contest, where America is one big team.
President OBAMA: We are part of the American family.
SHAPIRO: The president made this point repeatedly during Tuesday's State of the Union speech.
President OBAMA: We are still bound together as one people.
SHAPIRO: Lots of presidents have coined slogans and most failed to stick. President Clinton talked about the new covenant. Reagan and Nixon both had new federalism. One of the biggest duds was President Ford's whip inflation now.
Geoff Nunberg of UC Berkeley says the best predictor of a slogan's success is whether the program it's attached to succeeds. For example, Nunberg says people panned the phrase great society during the Johnson presidency.
Professor GEOFF NUNBERG (Information, UC Berkeley): It was considered at the time a pompous inflated choice of words. that Johnson initially had preferred a better deal, which didn't really take off. But because the program itself was so successful, the phrase is still with us.
SHAPIRO: Other times, political slogans have taken on a life of their own. Nunberg says Roosevelt never intended for the New Deal to be a slogan. It was just a phrase he dropped into his 1932 nomination acceptance speech at the last moment.
Prof. NUNBERG: It was picked up by the press. People liked the idea. For them it connoted a re-dealing of the cards. And certainly it was a very effective slogan for him long before it was attached to a political program.
SHAPIRO: Win the future also has the advantage of being vague. At the end of the recovery summer, people asked where the recovery was. The future, on the other hand, is always just around the corner.
Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.
SIMON: This is NPR News.