Turning The New Yorker Cover Around

Barack Obama went on Larry King's show tonight and did a very smart thing.

KING: Considering that, though, there's a lot of e-mails going around. It gets rather terrible. A "Newsweek" poll shows that 12 percent of America believes that you're a Muslim, and 26 believe -- 26 percent believe you were raised in a Muslim home. A lot of misinformation.

How do you fight that?

OBAMA: Well, you know, by getting on "Larry King" and telling everybody I'm a Christian and I wasn't raised in a Muslim home. And pledge allegiance to the flag. And, you know, all the things that have been reported in these e-mails are completely untrue and have been debunked again and again and again. So, all you can do is just tell the truth and trust in the American people that over time, they're going to know what the truth is.

One last point I want to -- I do want to make about these e-mails, though. And I think this has an impact on this "New Yorker" cover.

You know, this is actually an insult against Muslim-Americans, something that we don't spend a lot of time talking about. And sometimes I've been derelict in pointing that out.

You know, there are wonderful Muslim-Americans all across the country who are doing wonderful things. And for this to be used as sort of an insult, or to raise suspicions about me, I think is unfortunate. And it's not what America's all about.

Whether the right wing is trying to tar Obama as a terrorist or a black militant, it's clear to me that this is not dissimilar to a hate crime. With Obama having to yell "I'm not a Muslim, I'm not a Muslim" every two seconds, and with all the sensitivities surrounding associating him with Muslims (like the two women in Michigan who were removed from the sight lines of an Obama event because they had head scarves), it was extremely necessary that he say this. It's a fine line between distancing yourself from Muslims and another form of demonization, as if the worst thing in the world to be is a Muslim. So bravo to Sen. Obama for that one.

I also think that this is the gift of the New Yorker cover, to make the intangible tangible, to force the whisper campaign out of the shadows and give it sunlight. It's a lot harder to debunk an email forward than it is a major magazine cover. Now it's out there, and smart Democratic strategists would follow Obama here and use it as an opportunity to call this demonization and hatred by its name.

See also this New York Times article about Obama and comedy generally. I think everyone's way too politically correct in this country when it comes to comedy, but it's true that there's not much to satirize yet. I think Stewart had the right idea at the start by mocking the culture of deification AROUND Obama. But what the New Yorker did was thoroughly inside the boundaries. To wit:

Mr. Stewart, who is also an executive producer of “The Colbert Report,” said the Obama campaign’s reaction to the New Yorker cover seemed part of what is now almost a pro forma cycle in political campaigns. “Nothing can occur without the candidate responding,” he said.

Bill Maher, who is host of a politically oriented late-night show on HBO, said, “If you can’t do irony on the cover of The New Yorker, where can you do it?”

If I was still doing comedy, I'm sure I'd run up against this. Still, there is a bias among audiences that only a black guy can joke about black people, only a Jew can joke about Jews, etc. As David Alan Grier says in the article, "They’ve had 200 years of presidential jokes. It’s our time.”