In fact, I couldn't help but think that the former Los Angeles police chief's sudden emergence as an art and comedy critic might have something to do with his current race against Mark Ridley-Thomas for the county supervisor's seat in the heavily African American 2nd District, where Obama probably enjoys a 98% approval rating among registered voters.
It's interesting that this controversy -- which drew in both Obama and John McCain -- should have arisen in what's a kind of golden age for televised political satire. Still, in an interview with the New York Times, Comedy Central's Jon Stewart -- who is as sharp a political satirist as any now working -- said that jokes involving Obama often seem to fall flat with his audience. "People have a tendency to react as far as their ideology allows them," he said by way of explanation.
Maybe it's not just political correctness but our division into blinkered red and blue camps that's drained humor's salutary bite from our politics.
Or perhaps it's that Blitt and Remnick are up against another, more subtle problem. The New Yorker is one of the last great American publications in which the long tradition of politically and socially conscious cartooning persists with any vigor. One U.S. newspaper after another has used cost-cutting as an excuse to drop its political cartoonists. Nowadays, few newspapers even bother to run political cartoons on a regular basis.
As a result, when it comes to political comment and satire, we're becoming a nation of visual illiterates.
Moreover, for all their practiced outrage, neither political camp really objects to this sort of controversy. Every news cycle dominated by what are essentially ephemera -- like the New Yorker cover -- is another 24 hours in which Obama and McCain have been spared questions about real issues.
Insults are so much easier to deal with than issues.
Last week was a perfect case in point. According to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, nearly a quarter (23%) of all the print and broadcast coverage devoted to the presidential campaign during that seven-day period went to just two stories -- Jesse Jackson's sotto voce affront to Obama (13%) and McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm's insensitive remark about the recession being all in people's heads (10%).
Maybe we're not so much a humorless or overly sensitive people as we are a trivial one.
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timothy.rutten@latimes.com
