The New Yorker’s cartoon magazine cover, “depicting candidate [Barack Obama] in Muslim-style outfit fist-bumping gun-toting radical wife,” certainly provides a deliciously ironic moment in the presidential campaign. Obama has been warning about how those horrid Republicans were going to use his race and his name against him, and here his liberal friends at this liberal publication come up with a way to roll all kinds of innuendo against him into one memorable image that is now being splashed all over the media.

(I feel I can only feature an edited version of the image here, due to the fact that if I display the whole thing, I’ll be accused of being just another right-wing hate-blogger exploiting this liberal satire for my own evil ends.)

In the Huffington Post, Rachel Sklar asks, ” Why would they run a cover that could have run, irony-free, on the cover of the National Review?” Is she serious in thinking that the good people at National Review could have gotten away with running such a picture on their cover? Or that they would even want to? Elsewhere, it’s been described as “just as bad as Fox News.” Really. Jake Tapper at ABC News says that it’s “a recruitment poster for the right-wing.” (You see why I had to blur it!)

Well, as I said to a correspondent, it gets the New Yorker more publicity in ten minutes than that magazine usually gets in a year, which would have to please and motivate any editor, and I think is the ultimate purpose behind it. But a liberal publication certainly has a right to face the various innuendos about Obama squarely and make fun of them. The Obama campaign, on the other hand, knows and fears the power of images like those, as they’ve demonstrated multiple times in the past — famously to the point of asking women dressed in Muslim garb to step out of view when Obama took the stage at an event.

For the record, here in RWB land we don’t believe that Obama is a closet Muslim, no matter what the New Yorker says. I also don’t believe that Obama’s association with William Ayres means that one of his first actions as president would be to toss a molotov cocktail into the Pentagon. I don’t think that his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright means that Obama too believes that God is on the side of black people to destroy the white enemy.

I in fact presume — although I can’t know his heart — that Barack Obama loves his country, and as president he would do what he believed according to his best judgment was good for the country.

What Obama’s record and past associations convey, however, is a lack of especially brilliant judgment. In fact, he repeatedly displays pretty awful judgment, and a habit of reversing himself, right up to and including the recent relatively trivial episode where he allowed his young daughters to be interviewed for Access Hollywood and then days later announced that he regretted it.

If I were in charge of millions of dollars and were involved in making commercials to support the John McCain campaign, I would frame my “vicious right-wing attack ads” this way: I would make them all about judgment. There would be a series of ads, each using one example of a major failure of judgment on Obama’s part: friendship with William Ayres; real estate gifts from Tony Rezko; twenty year association with and heavy praise of Rev. Jeremiah Wright; and his call for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq in 2007 and 2006 and earlier, when doing so would certainly have precipitated a collapse and prevented the opportunity for stability that exists now from ever arriving. Each ad would concisely spell out how and why Barack Obama was wrong, and illustrate how he has flip-flopped, if applicable. Each ad would end with the simple statement: “Barack Obama: It’s a question of judgment.”

In addition to pointing out the flaws in his judgment, this would effectively turn one of Obama’s great advantages against him. That is, his youth, versus McCain’s age. Viewers would be encouraged to infer that while this McCain guy may be pretty old and not so nice to look at, at least he’s likely to have better and steadier judgment than this Senator Obama guy.

And then, pocketing a hefty fee for my dastardly work, I would retire to a life of luxury and obscurity.

(One that would still not include a subscription to the New Yorker.)

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