How Right Is the New Yorker Cover

Aides to Barack Obama are blasting a New Yorker magazine cover that depicts “President Obama” in the Oval Office, wearing a Muslim-style outfit and doing a fist-bump with his wife, Michelle, who is dressed in camouflage with an automatic rifle slung over her back.

A picture of Usama bin Laden hangs above the mantel of the fireplace, which has an American flag burning in it.

The July 21 cover, titled “The Politics of Fear,” is intended to be a parody, an attempt to show how “scare tactics and misinformation” are being used to try to derail Barack Obama’s campaign, says cover artist Barry Blitt.

“I think the idea that the Obamas are branded as unpatriotic [let alone as terrorists] in certain sectors is preposterous,” Blitt wrote in an e-mail to the Huffington Post. “It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is.”

The Obama campaign has had to fight an intensive e-mail spam campaign that claims Obama is secretly a Muslim, and his wife is a black radical. Campaign spokesman Bill Burton called the New Yorker cover over the top.

“The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” Burton said.

“But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

Obama did not reply to a question about the cover when he answered reporters’ questions on Sunday in San Diego. John McCain’s campaign also slammed the cover as “tasteless and offensive.”

The New Yorker editors also issued a statement Monday saying the cover “combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are.”

“The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fist-bump, the portrait on the wall? All of them echo one attack or another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd. And that’s the spirit of this cover,” reads the statement.

From Fox Election Headquarters: July 16, 2008