In a satirical swipe at the rabid-right rumors

about Barry and Michelle, the New Yorker depicts them

as terrorists [freedom fighters?] in the oval office

He's in Muslim clothing. She's got an Afro and military

garb, an AK-47 slung over her shoulder

Obamites Foam at the Mouth [Source]

In a campaign in which Senator Barack Obama touching fists with his wife sparked a "controversy", the New Yorker's latest cover was never going to slip onto newsstands unnoticed.

In a satirical swipe at the crazy rumours about the presidential candidate and his wife, Michelle, the liberal magazine depicts them as terrorists in the oval office.

Obama is in Muslim clothing; Michelle, in an Afro and military garb, has an AK-47 slung over he shoulder.

Naturally, the fist bumping is there, along with a portrait of Osama Bin Laden and an American flag roasting in the fireplace.

Asked about the image, Obama shrugged his shoulders. But his (and McCain's) spokespeople have made clear their disapproval, claiming most readers would judge the image "tasteless and offensive".

They may be right. Readers have declared they will abandon their subscriptions amid declarations that the cartoon, by Barry Blitt, was "gross, sick and pathetic".

The magazine's editor, David Remnick, believes the image "holds up a mirror" to the absurd and often malicious rumours that have stuck to his [Obama's] campaign. And he believes his readers are intelligent enough to get the joke.

Rather depressingly, it has been suggested that people won't understand the point of cartoon, titled "The Politics of Fear", and that the cover should have included a caption.

A caption? What would it have said?

'The New Yorker would like to inform readers that the above depiction is supposed to be funny. We don't really think Obama is a terrorist and we like Michelle's hairstyle as it is.

'Just in case any of you should think us unpatriotic, we remind readers that the Stars and the Stripes should be kept away from fire at all times.'

For anyone who needs a caption to get the joke, Remnick's most extensive explanation of the cover can be found in this question and answer session.

He says it "combines a number of images that have been propagated, not by everyone on the right but by some, about Obama's supposed "lack of patriotism" or his being "soft on terrorism" or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the second coming of the Weathermen or most violent Black Panthers. That somehow all this is going to come to the oval office."

By ridiculing these ideas about Obama, is the New Yorker helping to peel away layers of conspiratorial mud? Or, in the subconscious minds of the masses, will the image simply reinforce lingering fears about the Democratic candidate?

Obama: Man on the Make [New Yorker]

One day in 1995, Barack Obama went to see his alderman, an influential politician named Toni Preckwinkle, on Chicago’s South Side, where politics had been upended by scandal.

Mel Reynolds, a local congressman, was facing charges of sexual assault of a sixteen-year-old campaign volunteer. (He eventually resigned his seat.)

The looming vacancy set off a fury of ambition and hustle; several politicians, including a state senator named Alice Palmer, an education expert of modest political skills, prepared to enter the congressional race.

Palmer represented Hyde Park—Obama’s neighborhood, a racially integrated, liberal sanctuary—and, if she ran for Congress, she would need a replacement in Springfield, the state capital.

Obama at the time was a thirty-three-year-old lawyer, university lecturer, and aspiring office-seeker, and the Palmer seat was what he had in mind when he visited Alderman Preckwinkle.

“Barack came to me and said, ‘If Alice decides she wants to run, I want to run for her State Senate seat,’ ” Preckwinkle told me.

We were in her district office, above a bank on a street of check-cashing shops and vacant lots north of Hyde Park.

Preckwinkle soon became an Obama loyalist, and she stuck with him in a State Senate campaign that strained or ruptured many friendships but was ultimately successful.

Four years later, in 2000, she backed Obama in a doomed congressional campaign against a local icon, the former Black Panther Bobby Rush.

And in 2004 Preckwinkle supported Obama during his improbable, successful run for the United States Senate.

So it was startling to learn that Toni Preckwinkle had become disenchanted with Barack Obama.

Preckwinkle is a tall, commanding woman with a clipped gray Afro. She has represented her slice of the South Side for seventeen years and expresses no interest in higher office.

On Chicago’s City Council, she is often a dissenter against the wishes of Mayor Richard M. Daley.

For anyone trying to understand Obama’s breathtakingly rapid political ascent, Preckwinkle is an indispensable witness—a close observer, friend, and confidante during a period of Obama’s life to which he rarely calls attention.

Although many of Obama’s recent supporters have been surprised by signs of political opportunism, Preckwinkle wasn’t.

“I think he was very strategic in his choice of friends and mentors,” she told me. “I spent ten years of my adult life working to be alderman. I finally got elected. This is a job I love. And I’m perfectly happy with it.

"I’m not sure that’s the way that he approached his public life—that he was going to try for a job and stay there for one period of time.

"In retrospect, I think he saw the positions he held as stepping stones to other things and therefore approached his public life differently than other people might have.” Much More...