Well, The New Yorker cover got me thinking.
Although I've read attempts to find comparable caricatures of McCain, notably the idea that his POW status raises suspicion of him as a Manchurian candidate, I'm having a hard time finding a comparable caricature. I'm having a hard time thinking about other presidential candidates whose narrative fictions have been so believable.
The idea that McCain is a Manchurian candidate doesn't have much credence. What other caricatures might there be? Bill Clinton as a womanizer? Oh, wait. not a fiction. Hillary Clinton in 1992 as a feminist? Oh wait, not a fiction. George W. as a frat boy man-child? Oh wait, not a fiction.
Has there ever been a candidate and his wife more misunderstood than Barack and Michelle Obama?
The problem with The New Yorker cover is that it is already circulating on the internet in the form of the photo of Obama in traditional African garb. While editors defend their choice to run this cover as "obvious" satire, outside of New York, this is not caricature but confirmation.
What other presidential candidate could have been caricatured as unAmerican or unChristian and have it not be understood as caricature?
I can't think of a single candidate's wife who has been caricatured in the way Michelle Obama has been in this cartoon--or who could be. People might not have liked Hillary because she was too bright and too feminist, but they didn't suggest she was Jane Fonda during the Vietnam War.
The problem is that we are not having the dialogue about this African American candidate that we need to have, and so the fears and the conversations have gone underground. The New Yorker cover has tapped into that underground fear, and while the accompanying article may deal with it, the cover itself has no context.
I was shocked the other day when a man with whom I have regular political conversation suggested Michelle Obama is a black radical. This is a man who seemed to share my political leanings. An openly gay man who wants little more than a Democrat in the White House, who plans to go to California to marry his long-time partner, and who will probably vote for Obama regardless of what he thinks of his wife.
But what he thinks is now on the cover of The New Yorker.
This caricature is First Amendment stuff, and I'm not going to throw the good The New Yorker has done out with the bathwater. But what should concern us greatly is that too many people who otherwise love The New Yorker are upset because they believe this caricature will not draw attention to any "obvious" slurs or distortions, but will cement them.