Anchoring Obama's Trip

"Black voters were far more likely than whites to say that Mr. Obama cares about the needs and problems of people like them, and more likely to describe him as patriotic. Whites were more likely than blacks to say that Mr. Obama says what he thinks people want to hear, rather than what he truly believes. And about half of black voters said race relations would get better in an Obama administration, compared with 29 percent of whites.

"About 40 percent of blacks said that Mr. McCain, if elected president, would favor whites over blacks should he win the election.

"There was even racial dissension over Mr. Obama's wife, Michelle: She was viewed favorably by 58 percent of black voters, compared with 24 percent of white voters."

Talk about a Rorschach test. Those are sobering numbers.

On the New Yorker cover flap, Obama himself has now weighed in, telling Larry King: "I do think in attempting to satirize something, they probably fueled some misconceptions instead."

After 24 hours of denunciations of the New Yorker, a counternarrative has emerged, which is essentially: Y ou all need to get a sense of humor. Slate's Jack Shafer beats the media:

"I can understand how the campaigns, which drilled themselves in the umbrage dance during the primaries, might have acted reflexively to the magazine cover, but what excuse do the journalists and bloggers who condemned The New Yorker have?

"Although every critic of the New Yorker understood the simple satire of the cover, the most fretful of them worried that the illustration would be misread by the ignorant masses who don't subscribe to the magazine. Los Angeles Times blogger Andrew Malcolm wrote, 'That's the problem with satire. A lot of people won't get the joke. Or won't want to. And will use it for non-humorous purposes, which isn't the New Yorker's fault.' Malcolm continues in this vein, calling it a 'problem' that 'there's no caption on the cover to ensure that everyone' will understand the punch line.

"Here's ABC News' Jake Tapper singing the harmony line:

" Intent factors into these matters, of course, but no Upper East Side liberal -- no matter how superior they feel their intellect is -- should assume that just because they're mocking such ridiculousness, the illustration won't feed into the same beast in emails and other media. It's a recruitment poster for the right-wing.

"Calling on the press to protect the common man from the potential corruptions of satire is a strange, paternalistic assignment for any journalist to give his peers, but that appears to be what The New Yorker's detractors desire. I don't know whether to be crushed by that realization or elated by the notion that one of the most elite journals in the land has faith that Joe Sixpack can figure out a damned picture for himself."

Salon's Gary Kamiya goes so far as to quote Rush Limbaugh: