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one Doonesbury panel has a journalist asking McCain to e-mail the press a
document, and McCain replies, “You know, my friend, I didn’t have a fancy
laptop in prison.”35 McCain’s age led to morbid and apocalyptic cartoons in
which he dies and is succeeded by Vice President Palin. Jeff MacNelly once
pulled back a panel depicting Jimmy Carter laying a wreath entitled R.I.P. on
Truman’s grave with a ghostly S.O.B. rising up from the earth, after MacNelly
decided he had gone too far.36 In 2008 it would not have stood out.
“Sarah ‘Flash Card’ Palin”37 was also a cartoonist’s dream. Typically drawn
with a beehive hairdo and surrounded by bats, she was skewered for her
perceived lack of competence—she was unable to name a printed source she
regularly read to NBC’s Katie Couric, and was rumored by party insiders to
have called Africa a country—and for her angry insistence that her unmarried,
pregnant daughter was off-limits to the press, all in a political party which
stressed traditional family values. The newspapers generally did not comply.
Carter’s brother Billy had been caricatured as a drunken hillbilly in the 70s, and
Bill Clinton’s sexual scandals in the late 90s had somehow made satirizing the
intimate matters of a candidate’s family acceptable. It was now fair game to
portray the candidate’s children.
The cartoon controversy of the election would be a cover of the New Yorker
depicting Obama dressed as a radical Muslim with his wife clad as an anarchist
carrying a machine gun, fist-bumping as an American flag bums. The editors
insisted that the drawing was meant to mock the people who held such views. It
would perhaps be the purest satirical act of the election, as it was, typically,
misunderstood. Satire must also be judged by its impact, and one blogger noted
that “any satire that can be easily used to further the viewpoint it’s trying to
satirize, is, by definition, a failure.”38 The worst emotions were brought out in
all. Democrat organizers called it tasteless; Republicans decried humorless
Democrats who believed Americans so unable to grasp satire that “imagery must
be as tightly controlled as at an exhibition of Stalinist realism paintings,”39 all
while enjoying the benefits of voters who did in fact miss the joke and believe
that Obama was a Muslim terrorist. Yet the illustration made a taboo subject
acceptable, allowing pundits more freedom to satirize not Obama’s ‘race’ but
ugly perceptions of his ethnicity. A sarcastic cartoon depicts Obama lazing on a
Hawaiian beach smoking marijuana, burning an American flag with radicals,
and having ‘666’ tattooed on his forehead, with a flustered McCain adding, “I’m
John McCain and I’m ashamed to say my supporters believe this message.”40
Yet overall the influence of print was waning in favor of a much wider
media universe than existed in 1980. An explosion of specialty cable channels
had enlarged and fragmented the television viewership, and the internet had
changed all concepts of media delivery by making it interactive, as niche and
amateur websites steadily nibbled away at conventional, top-down media
industries. The economic constraints of having to inoffensively entertain a
general audience were less applicable to much new television programming, and
were irrelevant to non-profit websites. Thus there were fewer checks by