http://dailydoubt.blogspot.com/2008/07/problem-with-new-yorker-obama-cover.html

I turned my comment into a post with some quotes from The Authoritarians.

Satire is supposed to ridicule or scorn or make views look ridiculous. The New Yorker seems to think that the depiction itself is sufficient to accomplish that, but the bar for satire in America has been raised because that are self-evidently ludicrous have been elevated to mainstream respectability. Dear god, I flipped to CNN HN one night to see Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck informing me that Captain Planet is fascist propaganda which is part of the LIberal Fascist plan to created a one world government!

Excellent. Cuts right to the heart of the matter. It’s a striking image and will be around forever…

Suppose someone sees this and knows nothing about the magazine, except its name, and concludes that this is some East Coast urban liberal publication that is *celebrating* the outcome portrayed on the cover, and that the scene is not the “nightmare scenario” of someone else but the dream scenario of the people at that magazine.

I’m not sure many people would conclude that the editors of the New Yorker literally want a Muslim president who’d burn the American flag, and a terrorist for a First Lady. What’s more likely is that this “defense” of Obama might come off like “defenses” of George W. Bush’s alleged cowboy qualities. A lot of war supporters reveled in that characterization of Bush, and said things like, “Damn right he’s a cowboy, and he’s going to drag the black hats out of the saloon and show them who’s boss!” That turns out to have been a poor forecast of how things would go in Iraq, but even at the time it could only alienate people who weren’t already 100 percent supportive of Bush and his policies.

Similarly, this New Yorker cover can be read as a defense of a lot of policies and ideas supported by people who work at the New Yorker and read the New Yorker. “We want a better relationship with the Arab world; we wouldn’t really care if the US president were a Muslim; we don’t think flag burning should be illegal; we think that 60s-era radicals and various Kalashnikov-wielding leftist revolutionaries may have had a few good points; etc.” The effect isn’t to say, “Ha, these conspiracy theories are silly.” It’s to say, “Ha, the average American’s sense of where the country would end up if New Yorker readers/writers were in charge is silly.”

Just as responding to a charge of recklessness by saying, “Damn right Bush is a cowboy” just made the guy and his supporters seem even less serious and less responsible, responding to these rumors by saying, “Ha, ha, what if Obama WERE a secret Muslim?” may just reinforce the idea that he’s a cosmopolitan elitist whose candidacy lights the fires of–and should ONLY light the fires of–other cosmopolitan elitists. Your average undecided voter–whether or not he understands the alleged subtleties of this parody–probably doesn’t think it’s very funny to depict a portrait of bin Laden hanging in the Oval Office, and they probably wonder what kind of a candidate would draw the support of people who find that sort of thing to be the height of sophisticated wit.

I guess the impact of this is blunted by the fact that the average voter doesn’t know or care what the New Yorker has to say about anything. The question is, can both lines of attack be employed by anti-Obama people who reach a broader audience? In other words, can they say, “This cover shows that these rumors you’re hearing have a basis in fact, even though those pro-Obama snobs at the New Yorker are trying to make you feel like an idiot for being worried”?