The New Yorker Cover

This week's New Yorker cover is all over the web. Philip Weiss claims it might serve Obama in the end. Weiss writes: "Shocking satire resonates in unpredictable ways. It provokes people to think about stuff. The outrage over the cover may well redound to Obama's benefit, it could actually help to blow the rumor campaign out of the water."

I don't know. I know very intelligent voters who are convinced Obama is a closet Muslim. I think Weiss could be right with a caveat--Obama's team has time, if they use it, to combat this smear. They should not ignore it. They should come out with guns ablazin' against it. This is no Jesse Jackson comment, which helps Obama, while all he has to do is accept an apology. This is a serious damper on his campaign if he thinks everyone is smart enough to see the truth behind the smears. They aren't. People don't pay attention to politics; little filters through; you have to pound a message down everyone's throats day after day to counter a rumor that has traction like this.

Do I think that the New Yorker should not have run the cover? Of course not! It's a free world. Andrew Romano writes: "This line of reasoning--i.e., don't satirize something stupid because the people who believe it might be stupid enough to take you seriously--strikes me as painfully paternalistic. " Absolutely. It's not the media's job to run Obama's campaign. It's a free country, and if that makes it hard on poor politicians, so what.

In other news, the NYT has a piece up about there being no comedic "take" on Obama. That's exactly right. How do you make fun of him? Rush Limbaugh derided the idea today--but then said that the funny thing about Obama was the same as John Kerry, that he's a flip-flopper. Well, that's the point. That's Kerry's comedic take, not Obama's. When Limbaugh makes fun of Obama it's always like he's making fun of Jesse Jackson. Really, the comedic take on Obama is his race. But nobody wants to go there. It's too hard to do. Obama's not a self-parody like the clownish Al Sharpton or the pretentious Jesse Jackson. He's too serious. This quality could itself become the comedic take, and I predict it will, over time. That is, after he's in the White House, they'll be some moment where it is revealed that he can't take a joke. Once he's president and we're used to him, then the jokes will come. But right now his character on SNL for example was the least funny presidential candidate impression probably ever.