When Art Gives Offense

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Magazine's 'Satirical' Obama Cover Stirs Outrage

A satirical New Yorker magazine cover cartoon depicting Barack Obama and his wife as flag-burning, fist-bumping radicals drew outrage from the Democratic presidential candidate's campaign as it appeared on newsstands Monday.

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"While it is surely true that Obama's campaign specializes in whining, this gripe ought not be dismissed quite so casually as most of the headquarters hand-wringing.

"To be sure, the New Yorker cover art is satire -- perhaps not as smart or stylish as what you will find in a random issue of The Onion, but satire all the same. The problem is not that The New Yorker has tried to make a mockery of right-wing efforts to smear the Obamas. It is that The New Yorker has not done a very good job of it."

The even larger problem, Nichols says, is that "Barack Obama has yet to fully or functionally introduce himself to the American people." Well, he is new on the national scene. But hasn't he established that he's not a Muslim terrorist?

At the New Republic, Eve Fairbanks says the cover "seems to me ultimately more dull than provocative -- a collection of the most obvious smear narratives about Obama, lumped together and mediocrely illustrated. It's no better than Perry Bacon's infamous Washington Post story, 'Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him.' Both outlets claimed not to support the allegations they were visually or rhetorically putting forward -- ob viously! -- and yet a reader would have to have a fairly sophisticated understanding of each outlet's ethos to immediately intuit the intended ironic distance."

Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum has a different reaction--a failure of nerve:

"I had two reactions, myself. To be honest, my first one was that it was kinda funny, a clever way of mocking all the conservative BS that's been circulating about the Obamas.

"But at the risk of seeming humorless, that reaction didn't last too long. Maybe it's because this kind of satire just doesn't work, no matter how well it's done. But mostly it's because a few minutes thought convinced me it was gutless. If artist Barry Blitt had some real cojones, he would have drawn the same cover but shown it as a gigantic word bubble coming out of John McCain's mouth -- implying, you see, that this is how McCain wants the world to view Obama. But he didn't. Because that would have been unfair. And McCain would have complained about it. And for some reason, the risk that a failed satire would unfairly defame McCain is somehow seen as worse than the risk that a failed satire would unfairly defame Obama."

McCain may be playing hardball, but he's hardly suggesting that Obama is a Muslim or a terrorist.

Doesn't anyone out there like the cover?

John McQuaid, for one, detects "an absurd decorousness in the denunciations":

"Free expression is a bulwark of American liberalism, part of what makes it what it makes it superior to political philosophies that rigidly enforce what words can be uttered and images can be shown. When liberals start policing the 'poor taste' of cartoons so that some people don't get the 'wrong idea,' it only reinforces the notion that all the fearmongering was effective, and perhaps right -- and also shows how weak and tenuous Democrats fear their position on terrorism remains."

The New York Times investigates and discovers a humor deficit when it comes to the Obama campaign: