Satire or outrage?
The cover of the upcoming issue of The New Yorker shows Barack Obama in a white turban and robes giving a fist bump to his wife, Michelle, who sports an Afro, an AK-47 and a bandoleer of ammo.
It all takes place in the Oval Office. To the right is a picture of Osama bin Laden, and an American flag is burning in the fireplace.
In a news release previewing the issue, the magazine said that the cartoon, “The Politics of Fear,” by artist Barry Blitt, satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the election campaign to derail Obama’s bid for the presidency.
Obama shrugged and said he had no response when reporters asked him about the cover yesterday.
But later, campaign spokesman Bill Burton bashed the drawing.
“The New Yorker may think that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree,” he said.
In a statement Monday, the magazine said the cover “combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are.”
“The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fist-bump, the portrait on the wall? All of them echo one attack or another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd. And that’s the spirit of this cover,” the New Yorker statement said.
And ABC News quoted a high-profile Obama supporter as calling the cover “as offensive a caricature as any magazine could publish, and I suspect that other Obama supporters like me are also thinking about not subscribing to or buying a magazine that traffics in such trash.”
The John McCain campaign agreed the cartoon is “tasteless and offensive.”
Already the cover was generating controversy on the Internet.
The Huffington Post, a left-leaning blog, said: “Anyone who’s tried to paint Obama as a Muslim, anyone who’s tried to portray Michelle as angry or a secret revolutionary out to get Whitey, anyone who has questioned their patriotism – well, here’s your image.”