Drawing a message

Here's a famous cartoon, and about as hard-hitting as it got in the notoriously genteel world of Victorian caricature. By John Tenniel, it depicts Benjamin Disraeli as an oriental peddlar, of the type who sold Aladdin his magic lamp, presenting Victoria with the crown of India. She was now, you see, officially an empress, a promotion that more serious-minded thinkers and politicians (such as Gladstone) thought a piece of empty theatricality. It plays on Disraeli's image as a showman, as a slightly overdressed and mildly camp poseur, but most particularly as someone who is not entirely English. If it were published today, Punch would probably have faced accusations of anti-semitism.

The image nails Disraeli, though, just as Steve Bell's famous drawing of John Major wearing Y-fronts outside his trousers nailed him, and did for his government almost as fatally as Black Wednesday or all those allegations of sleaze. Similarly, Spitting Image's portrayal of David Steel as a homunculus peeking out of David Owen's pocket ruined the electoral prospects of the Liberal/ SDP alliance in the 1980s. Yet the same show's vision of a pin-stripe suited Margaret Thatcher dismissing her cabinet as "vegetables" did her no harm at all. All these pictures and sketches told a truth. It's hard to think of an equivalent summation of Tony Blair. No cartoonist really got him. He was too paradoxical: a perpetually grinning, effortlessly charming war criminal, he didn't quite compute. Private Eye's evocation of the Vicar of St Albion's came closest, at least in the early years; the flaw was that, in the end, it was too affectionate. Really effective caricatures have some element of real venom.

So what about Cartoongate, or NewYorkergate, or whatever they decide to call it? While the cartoonist Barry Blitt's intentions were obvious - drawing attention to the absurdity of many of the "smears" against Barack Obama and his wife - the loudly-expressed outrage by both the Obama campaign and many of his supporters in the press and elsewhere suggests that the picture raises real fears. Real fears in the Obama camp, and real fears in the minds of some voters.

The cartoon was was immediately denounced by an Obama spokesman as "tasteless and offensive", which is also a slightly ambiguous formulation. What they are really worried about, of course, is that there are voters out there who are moronic enough to take it seriously, who believe the stuff about Obama being secretly a Muslim (he is, in fact, like many presidents, secretly an agnostic) or being somehow "anti-American". No doubt they think that there are a lot of morons out there; it's an easy to form impression given some of the stuff out there in the cyberverse (or, indeed, on Fox TV). One of the most astute comments on the affair, and one of the earliest, was from Andrew Malcolm in the LA Times: "politicians don't like satire because it's subject to differing interpretations." To the well-heeled, impeccably liberal readership of the New Yorker, Blitt's intention may not be in doubt. But to minds front-loaded with any of the Rumours, it kind of makes sense. It chimes.

This is, after all, a man who has been photographed wearing traditional (and in some sense "Islamic") African dress, who was brought up abroad, and who began his campaign with talk, soon dropped, of undertaking "unconditional" discussions with the Iranians. His wife's dress sense may owe more to Jacquie Kennedy than Foxxy Cleopatra from Goldmember, but she certainly has "attitude", something which has made her at times seem uncomfortably testy. More importantly, the whole thrust on the McCain campaign appears to be one of national security. He hasn't, so far, offered any solutions to America's financial or social problems, but he presents himself as a grizzled all-American war hero who will be Strong and take on the country's enemies (who are also, of course, the Enemies of Freedom). So creating the impression in the public mind (or in parts of it at least) that there's something not quite patriotic about Barack Obama is pretty much the only chance he has.

Drawing attention to the cartoon is a high-risk strategy for the Obama campaign, precisely because it turns it into such a big story, and ensures that everyone, but everyone, will have seen it. Even if the story becomes one of a sophisticated joke gone slightly awry, the image won't go away. It has the power to summon up other, real images: Obama in a turban, Michelle doing the "terrorist fist jab". Directly, it refers to the smears, which the vast majority of Americans know to be rubbish. Indirectly, it reinforces the mainstream Republican narrative which draws more subtly upon those smears. For Barack Obama is an exotic. It is part of his appeal - especially to non-Americans, of course, who can't vote. It enables him to transcend traditional barriers of race, class, or denomination. But it also creates in some Americans a sense of unease. It's not a question of race (or indeed religion); rather, it is one of "otherness".

Forget Michelle's afro, or the portrait of Osama (what a difference a letter makes...) or the flag burning merrily in the fireplace. They don't work. But Barack in the turban and robe, like the Victorian image of a turbanned Disraeli, hits the mark. Barry Blitt may not have wanted to hurt Obama, but it's possible that he has nevertheless found the caricature that will define him.