I’d say they’re more obsessed with his smile. Like Carter’s, it is massive and friendly, and very angular – your eyes are drawn to it. It is easily his most identifiable feature, next to his ears.

One of the big worries many have had (myself included) is that people will attempt to “protect” the President from criticism and parody, under the claim that any attempt to skewer him is automatically race-fueled. I don’t think at all this is coming from the President himself – he appears to have a very good sense of humor – but people who want to “come to his aid” that will be percieved as coming from the President himself.

People thought Ross Perot looked like a chimp, and said so. Nobody minded. There’s whole websites dedicated to comparing photos of Bush to monkeys. I GET that it’s easily-misunderstood ground with Obama. But as soon as you say some things “can’t/shouldn’t be said” you limit the ability of the cartoonist of comedian to entertain. But where was the outrage when Condaleeza Rice was drawn as a parrot with Topsy curls and a Stepin Fetchit accent?

We’re in an over-litigious age of people with thin skins and a Blackberry full of contacts for the news media. Comedians and cartoonists are second-guessing themselves, hesitating over whether or not this joke of that drawing will be “taken the wrong way”. Again, it’s not Obama doing it, but the (over-)sensitivity because of the unique parameters of the historic position we’re now in.

I’m personally upset and annoyed to be in a world where people insist that certain things “aren’t funny anymore”. Yes they are. in the right hands, told at the right time, when people realize that they are jokes and not subtle political statements and step one of a campaign to destroy the world, EVERYTHING can be funny. But instead we laugh, and then furtively look around to make sure others were laughing, or that people weren’t offended. Go woth the gut reaction – if you laughed, it was funny. If it looks like Obama, it’s Obama, not a monkey in a suit intended to pass a racial comment.

I await with bated breath to see Gerry Trudeau’s icon for the new president in Doonesbury. Maybe a halo, or corona. Or maybe he’ll just never use the President at all for fear of being taken the wrong way. Which will in itself be taken as an attack by some.

And you think you can’t win with comics fans…

What do you think?

http://markandrich.googlepages.com/obama468.jpg/obama468-full.jpg

Suffice to say, there was a huge outcry on campus because everyone assumed it was a black burglar with big stereotyped lips instead of just a guy in a ski mask. So yeah, this can be a touchy issue.