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Irony the Tragic Victim of the 2008 Election

The New Yorker cover this week indulges all of the prejudices against Obama at once. Here's the description:

The cover of the New Yorker magazine depicts a caricature of Sen. Barack Obama as Muslim in the Oval Office with a flag burning in the fireplace and a painting of Osama bin Laden on the wall.

It also shows Michelle Obama with an Afro and an AK-47 on her back.

The Obama campaign responds:

?The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."

In addition to being false, the response is both pompous and calculated. The campaign, first of all, has no idea how New Yorker readers will react to the cover, but odds are that they will be favorable. There's certainly little interest in the magazine to offend their regular readers, even if it means a spike in readers one month.

Also, the actual readers of the magazine will understand what the cover is attempting to do, first because they're New Yorker readers and can get the joke, and second because they'll see this description in the magazine:

?On the cover of the July 21, 2008, issue of The New Yorker, in ?The Politics of Fear,? artist Barry Blitt satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the presidential election to derail Barack Obama?s campaign.?

The Obama camp's response is not just false, though. It manages to include the Obama campaign's trademark pompousness by first ascribing a false point of view to "most" of the New Yorker's readers. (No empirical data was collected by the campaign, to my knowledge). And then claiming that they simply "agree" with that viewpoint, which, by the way, still doesn't exist.

And lastly, no one in the Obama campaign is *actually* worried about the New Yorker's readers. This response only happens because of what will happen with tonight's cable news media coverage -- lots of it will be over the picture. The campaign can't say it's ok with the ironic commentary in the New Yorker because it's insightful and humorous.

All they can say is that it's tasteless, lest they be seen as approving of the image itself, irony removed, with the very likely chance that such an approval would mean the image's dissemination to audiences who don't understand what the New Yorker was trying to do.

I can't blame the Obama campaign's calculation on that point (or the McCain camp's "I don't want to to touch this with a 10 foot pole" agreement). But it is a little depressing that a campaign claiming to be honest and refreshing is bowing to the reality that people don't understand irony.

Full post as published by Expressio Unius on July 14, 2008 (boomark / email).