I had already been talking to some of America's best editorial cartoonists about the enduring power of a single well-drawn image when the New Yorker delivered the proof with megaton force -- this week's cover depicting that closet jihadist, Barack Obama.
Put a turban on the senator from Illinois, dress his wife up in camo and an assault rifle, and you get the whole country talking. Some folks were outraged at the elite magazine's insensitivity; others thrilled at the satiric skewering of an absurd myth.
Newspaper publishers and editors take note: Even in that wildly divided audience, no one doubted the cartoon's power to engage and provoke.
Because cartoonists have such a potent ability to excite, infuriate, perplex and amuse, you would think that newspapers -- struggling to maintain audiences in the Internet Age -- might lovingly nurture them.
Instead, cartoonists are disappearing like brunet anchors at Fox News -- about a hundred are scratching out a living today, compared with about double that a couple of decades ago. And this presidential election cycle has been less engaging for their absence.
"Thanks to the Net, newspapers need more than ever a way to stand out in the crowd," said John Cole, cartoonist for the Times-Tribune of Scranton, Pa. "And having a give-'em-hell cartoonist is an excellent way to do that."
I talked to David Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about cartoonists going the way of the dodo bird, and that got us wondering about a time when there will be no professionals left, leaving drawing the candidates to -- well, see Horsey's accompanying cartoon.
(Other cartoons by Horsey, who has earned two Pulitzer Prizes, can be viewed at www.davidhorsey.com "> www.davidhorsey.com .)
I might have asked The Times cartoonist to sketch out this problem but -- oops -- the paper ditched Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez in 2005 for reasons that remain murky. Ramirez was not replaced -- part of an un-proud tradition at Tribune Co., which owns The Times and has been paring away cartoonists with some abandon.
The loss feels especially painful in regard to The Times, because many of our readers faithfully began their day with the opinion pages. They felt compelled to see how Paul Conrad (a three-time Pulitzer winner) would find yet another way to peel back the veneer on Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and scores of others.
