New Yorker's Obama Cover Touches Nerve

This week's cover of The New Yorker magazine portrays Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, standing in the Oval Office after winning the presidential election. Of course, that vision alone is enough to get some people worked up. But the illustrator, Barry Blitt, has pulled out all the stops in his portrayal of the would-be first couple. Barack wears a turban and tribal Muslim attire. His wife, who has combed out her afro, wears a semi-automatic rifle on her back and gives her husband a "terrorist fist-jab" beneath a painting of Osama bin Laden that hangs above a fireplace aflame with the American flag.

In short, the cartoonist is capturing the essence of the right-wing's Obama nightmare/wet-dream. To my mind, it's a brilliant piece of satire, precisely because it exposes how laughably transparent many Americans are in their Obamaphobia. But not everyone agrees, of course, including the Obama campaign. Via ABC's Jake Tapper:

Said Obama spox Bill Burton: "The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.

Knowing the liberal politics of the magazine, I believe the magazine's staff when they say the illustration is meant ironically, as a parody of the caricature some conservatives (and some supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.) are painting of the Obamas..."

And (via Politico) the McCain campaign is also offended:

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds quickly e-mailed: "We completely agree with the Obama campaign, it's tasteless and offensive."

Does Burton have a point? Sure. This image will no doubt become an e-mail-forwarded classic. To his enemies, the cover will represent not a joke, but the ultimate "I told you so!" Essentially, then, the argument against the cover is that it's too subtle for stupid people to understand. Thus, The New Yorker should lower its intellectual standards so that the basest among us (including those that the cartoon is lampooning) don't get the wrong idea.

To my mind, however, the cover art helps Obama more than it hurts him because A) it is funny, and B) it confronts the outlandish perceptions that many have Americans have of Obama head on. The image won't convert anybody into thinking Obama is a terrorist, it simply exposes the prejudices that already exist. Besides, it's good practice for when the real life Obamas take over residence in the White House. After all, an American president is perhaps the single most popular subject for cartoonists in the world.The New Yorker's Editor-in-Chief, David Remnick was asked about his decision to run the cover, and had this to say (via HuffPo):

Obviously I wouldn't have run a cover just to get attention--I ran the cover because I thought it had something to say. What I think it does is hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imagining about Barck Obama's -- both Obamas' -- past and their politics. I can't speak for anyone else's interpretations, all I can say is that it combines a number of images that have been propagated, not by everyone on the right but by some, about Obama's supposed "lack of patriotism" or he being "soft on terrorism" or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the second coming of the Weathermen or the most violent Black Panthers. That somehow all this is going to come to the Oval Office.

The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are... We've run many many satirical political covers. Ask the Bush administration how many.

Good for The New Yorker, and Remnick. And kudos to Barry Blitt for the spot-on humor. To those who think that the image somehow captures the real vision of things to come, the joke's on you. Blitt's target is irrational prejudice and fear mongering, not Barack Obama.