This is wandering pretty deep into English major geek territory, but the typography on this sign is a single quote left, which should always be accompanied by its pal, the single quote right. There is no quotation being attempted here, so this makes little sense.
The campaign and its designers surely intended to use a ’ (apostrophe) character which alerts the reader that characters were omitted (see can + not = can't). It can also be used to indicate possession, but now we're getting way over the average user's head. As Dave Barry once pointed out, most people think an apostrophe exists to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a word , as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ITEM'S.
I will pause here and allow everyone to go back and make their own "omitted character" joke on the president's behalf.
Moving on, there is still one more mystery to these signage issues. It seems that plenty of other times the Bush campaign got the apostrophe issue a little righter (if not completely correct). The following keyring decoration is sometimes called a "tick mark" but its real name is a prime:
Primes are an insanely complicated (for me) math concept, and really don't have anything to do with the electoral process. Still, it looks and works better than the single quote left.
In summation, it's hard to believe that such inattention to typographical detail didn't hurt the Bush campaign more than it did.
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