1. On September 23, Kevin Drum at the _Mother Jones_ website wrote a “post”:http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2008/09/obama_and_ayers.html about conservative efforts to find evidence of deep ties between Barack Obama and William Ayers, the former Weatherman who committed several serious terrorist acts in the early 1970s. The point of Drum’s post was that those efforts had turned up virtually nothing. As most potential voters know, John McCain has since attempted to make the relationship between Ayers and Obama a central theme of the election campaign.
When I first read Drum’s post, I had a revelation, which is that _the underlying truth always matters._ It seems to be true that Obama is not close to William Ayers, which, if it is important to you to prove that the two men have a close relationship, is a serious problem.
But more to the point, it also seems clear that, whatever one thinks of Obama, he is not an especially “radical” thinker, apparently has never shown the slightest interest in using violence to further his goals, and doesn’t subscribe to the antiestablishment antipathy of Ayers or his former pastor Jeremiah Wright.
Again, the underlying reality matters: In much the same way that Obama is not a 1960s-era radical who has shown any interest in blowing up buildings for political reasons, Obama is also not a box turtle. Ads that set out to prove that Obama is such a radical or box turtle are equally likely to fail—because the underlying premise is moot.
Speaking of Barry Blitt’s now notorious “fist jab” cover, Art Spiegelman said something related to this at the New Yorker Festival; I mentioned it in my “writeup”:http://emdashes.com/2008/10/new-yorker-festival-art-spiege.php of the event. He said that it took the whole country two news cycles to realize that … Obama is not a radical. This fact lies at the core of the sneaky brilliance of the cover.
The underlying truth matters. The cover, and the decision to run the cover, both stem from an understanding of Obama’s nature as patently not very radical, and that may be why the slow, slow fuse of the cover was so effective, and (in the end) so much less worthy of contempt.
2. Yesterday Daniel Radosh put up a very insightful “post”:http://www.radosh.net/archive/002512.html about the potential misuse of satire once it is “liberated” from its original context.
To back up a moment, most of us are familiar with the occasional phenomenon of satirical news stories from _The Onion_ or some other source popping up in the press as “legitimate news stories”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion#The_Onion_taken_seriously. Also at the Festival, Stephen Colbert alluded to a similar incident in which a website dedicated to defending Tom Delay incorporated a clip from _The Colbert Report_ in which Colbert “defended” Delay. (Thanks to Rachel Sklar’s comprehensive “account”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/05/stephen-colbert-at-the-em_n_132019.html of that event, which helped me pin down my memory.)
One of the premises of the original debate around the Blitt cover was that _New Yorker_ readers or really anyone seeing the cover with the familiar “New Yorker” lettering would be very unlikely to regard the drawing as a smear against Obama; others, presumably fearful of future Republican attacks, contended that the image was so loaded that its power might well exceed the borders of that _New Yorker_ frame.
True to his fellow satirists, Radosh disclaims any responsibility on the part of the satirist for the unintended uses of his or her work and simultaneously takes the position that such uses are unlikely anyway. (I stress I’m not slamming him for this; this stuff is tricky.) In the post yesterday, Radosh brought to our notice a fascinating counterpoint to the Blitt cover.
You see, it turns out that those horribly “racist” “Obama Bucks”:http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/16/obama-bucks/ (scare quotes are necessary, I’m afraid) started out as a liberal satire of Republican excesses—a distant shadow of the Blitt cover, one might say—and then got widely reported as an _example_ of those excesses. Remarkably, Diane Fedele, a Republican Party official in California who found the image and decided to use it in a newsletter, has been obliged to “resign”:http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/2008/10/23/D940B6OO0_obama_illustration/index.html her post.
I’m not sure that Fedele’s credulity or ill intent, however defined, really makes the original satire any better or worse; from where I sit, it still looks pretty crude to me, if undeniably potent. Maybe it all reflects poorly on Republicans, that a satire of their excesses could be regarded by friend and foe alike as legitimate examples of same; I don’t know.
But as for Blitt’s cover, it is a reminder that the existence of the frame matters, and quality matters too. I’m guessing that Blitt is a more experienced practitioner of visual satire than the creator of those Obama Bucks, and that experience may be the element that prevented the image from actually harming people, instead sparking a discussion about whether it might harm people.