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NEW YORK — John McCain and Barack Obama may have pledged to run campaigns free of dirty politics, but the presumptive Democratic nominee is already fighting off a nasty perceived smear. This one, however, was born from the unlikeliest of places: a magazine that has been one of the most forceful mainstream critics of President George W. Bush.
Political websites swarmed all day yesterday with accusations of racism against a bastion of literary liberal thought after The New Yorker published a cover illustration that portrays Mr. Obama as a turban-wearing, flag-burning admirer of Osama bin Laden trading a so-called "terrorist fist jab" in the Oval Office with his wife Michelle, who is done up in a Black Power-era 1970s fashion with an Afro hairstyle and an AK-47 slung over her back.
The illustration by the Canadian-born, Connecticut-based artist Barry Blitt, titled The Politics of Fear, was intended as a satirical thumb in the eye of those who have attempted to smear Mr. Obama as unpatriotic or a terrorist sympathizer, but rather than react with knowing smugness, his supporters were sent into paroxysms of disbelief that a caricature so seemingly hateful could be published by The New Yorker.
"Speechless," declared the Democratic blogger John Aravosis.
Controversial satirical New Yorker cover showing Barack Obama as a Muslim and his wife as a terrorist was denounced Monday by Mr. Obama's campaign as 'tasteless and offensive'
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At the Huffington Post, the novelist Trey Ellis said that, while, "I get the intended joke ... dressing up perhaps the next president of the United States as the new millennium equivalent of Adolf Hitler is just gross and dumb."
A coalition of African-American media and political organizations called for the magazine to be pulled from store shelves, while irate readers deluged the publication's midtown offices with phone calls and e-mails that were met with automated responses.
A McCain representative agreed with the statement by an Obama campaign spokesman that the cover was "tasteless and offensive."
Commentators on the right, who were the caricature's presumed target, reacted with glee.
Many promised to sell T-shirts bearing the image.
Reeling from the response, the magazine issued a statement from editor David Remnick, who was made available for very limited interviews. "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," he said in the statement.
Mr. Blitt defended his illustration in an e-mail to the Huffington Post: "I think the idea that the Obamas are branded as unpatriotic (let alone as terrorists) in certain sectors is preposterous. It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is."
After the outcry, the magazine also posted a gallery on its website of some of Blitt's previous work under the title "The Politics of Satire," which included a post-Hurricane Katrina illustration of the Bush cabinet blithely failing to recognize that the Oval Office is being swamped.
Another had Vice-President Dick Cheney during the 2004 election campaign undergoing a physical, with his blood pressure measured against the colour-coded Homeland Security threat level system ("low-guarded-elevated-high-severe").
The current flap illustrates the difficulty of making jokes about a campaign in which both candidates come in already bearing scars over issues of race or ethnicity: Mr. McCain lost his bid for the 2000 Republican nomination after Bush operatives alleged that he had an illegitimate black daughter, while Mr. Obama has faced numerous campaigns of misinformation about his religion and has yet to appear at a mosque, a touchy issue because of ambivalence in the electorate over the role of Islam in American politics.
Early last month, the Fox News anchor E.D. Hill was demoted after she introduced a segment on body language by rhetorically speculating that the fist bump Mr. Obama shared with his wife on the night of the final Democratic primary might be "a terrorist fist jab."
Yesterday, one prominent cartoonist who didn't want to publicly criticize The New Yorker said he felt the current cover illustration was ill-timed, coming almost six weeks after the removal of the Fox host.
With satire and commentary available in greater volume and in higher velocity than the 2004 election cycle, even weekly magazines may have difficulty staying ahead of the curve.
