Debate prep casts doubt about the cop-on of Obama and his team

IT DOESN’T reach quite the readership of Time, but The New Yorker magazine matters, too.

In fact, the cover of The New Yorker can be enormously important to political figures. In the run-up to the last presidential election, the magazine ran a cover cartoon of Michelle and Barack Obama which infuriated the Democrats and mortified not a few Republicans.

The cartoonist portrayed the two figures in the oval office of the White House, Obama wearing Muslim white robes and headgear, Michelle looking like a latter-day Angela Davis with Afro hair, submachine gun slung over her shoulder, combat boots, giving her husband a fist bump. It may have been intended as liberal satire, but instead played into all the stereotypes about the Obamas. “Tasteless and offensive,” was how the Democrat campaign described Barry Blitt’s cartoon at the time.