Barack Obama Opposed to Satire

If you haven’t seen already, the most recent issue of The New Yorker features a cover cartoon that has the Obama and McCain campaigns ‘outraged’. The cover features the caricatures of the Obamas as they must be imagined by readers of the most radical reactionary anti-Obama scare emails. Among other things, Barack Obama is not wearing an American flag lapel pin and not saying the pledge of allegiance. I think it’s a mildly funny satirical carton that shows how crazy these criticisms of Obama are. Even though The New Yorker has no direct interest in this, it is a public service to bring this craziness to the forefront and expose how stupid it is.

But, as is often the case, mine is not the only opinion. Team Obama portrays the cartoon as a mean-spirited hate piece. It appears to the darker angels of our nature and adds weight to the crazy scare emails about Obama. Barack Obama is deeply offended (He may actually be offended, but he has chosen to be publicly offended).

The Obama campaign’s reaction to this cartoon strikes me as a significant blunder. By complaining loudly about the cartoon (and allowing John McCain to also publicly denounce the piece) Obama is making it a bigger story. In fact, the biggest story right now is that Barack Obama is upset about a cartoon in The ‘right-wing’ New Yorker. While this seems trivial and strange, it also makes him look defensive and and not very confident. It makes marginal voters wonder why he is protesting so much. Is he not really ‘one of us’? as Hillary Clinton would constantly ask, but of course never ask... This question is pretty ridiculous, but it’s also the type of question that determines who gets to be President in a democracy (Remember Thomas Dewey couldn’t be President because he had a mustache).

Full Disclosure: I voted for Barack Obama in my primary. He got my vote mainly because I thought he represented a more internationalist streak in the Democratic Party, whereas Hillary Clinton represented a mean-spirited streak.