The New Yorker cover also misses its audience, people inclined to support Obama.
Instead of choosing Obama and his wife as subjects, why didn't the magazine poke fun at the perpetrators: the "low information" voters, the right extremists and their talk radio idols. Oh yeah, that's what they were trying to do.
Depicting Michelle as a terrorist is pretty painful. I wonder if they'll do Cindy and John McCain next. I wonder if they've ever shown Laura Bush in such an ugly manner.
Also, the cover needs an explanation. Satire shouldn't need to be explained. Here's the explanation from editor David Remnick:
This cover has quickly become very controversial. The Obama campaign has called it "tasteless and offensive." Why did you run it?Now that they've explained, I guess I can see the ha ha. But for Obama supporters, it touches a raw nerve.
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 imaginings about Barack 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 his being "soft on terrorism" or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the second coming of the Weathermen or 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.
