Tempest on a Magazine Cover

What bizarre bedfellows and blood enemies this presidential election campaign has made. Each week seems to produce some new episode that, far from stoking the smoldering embers of partisan warfare, actually pits one faction of the American Left against another, causing them to fall upon each other like so many frenzied hyenas while non-liberals gaze on with bemused smirks, sometimes even lending a kind word of support to one side or the other. Like all entertaining spectacles, the primary clash of those two Democratic titans, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, had to come to an end eventually; but it was not long before America’s knack for crass bacchanalia stepped in to pick up the slack. In the past month alone, the 2008 campaign has brought us quadrennial shit-disturber Ralph Nader accusing Senator Obama of “talking white”—for failing to propose nationalizing the banking industry or abolishing unearned incomes, one imagines—as well as corporate shake-down artist Jesse Jackson’s stated wish to amputate the good Senator’s gonads for the principal sin of “talking down to black people”.

The third week of July has thus far treated us to the hue and cry over the cover art of The New Yorker’s latest issue. Its depiction of a turban-wearing Senator Obama fist-bumping a camouflage-clad, assault rifle-toting, fully-Afro’d Michelle in the Oval Office, with a wall-hanging portrait of Osama bin Laden overlooking a star-spangled banner merrily roasting in the fireplace:






















...has sent America’s chattering classes into their latest fit of outraged conniptions. “The New Yorker may think…that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” lamented Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton. “But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.” It was not long before McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds and, eventually, Senator McCain himself hopped on the bandwagon, adding that they could see how many would find the cover offensive. Several months ago, the de facto Republican nominee commended Hillary Clinton, claiming she had indeed been the victim of sexist smears during the Democratic primaries. Now Senator McCain repeats that feat, defending one liberal voice from the purported mud-slinging of another. Meet Pair of Strange Bedfellows #1.

A frankly disturbing number of observers appear to have taken the magazine’s cheeky cover at face value. Does no one do any homework before passing political judgments anymore? Does no one realize that the New Yorker is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal publication, one that is openly sympathetic to the Democratic Party in general and to Senator Obama in particular? Indeed, the magazine is emblematic of the very same wealthy, white, college-educated, intellectually haughty, insufferably self-satisfied “limousine liberal” demographic that happens to constitute a pillar of Senator Obama’s electoral base. True to this form, The New Yorker has been harshly critical of the nonsensical caricatures of the Senator and his wife peddled by some of his less scrupulous conservative detractors. Given the content of the magazine’s cover, the track record of the publication itself and the context surrounding this whole situation, it is plainly obvious that the creator of this latest cover was taking aim at Senator Obama’s least reputable critics, not at the Senator himself. Yet that has in no way deterred legions of professional hand-wringers from braying over this latest faux pas. Now, here I am, implicitly defending the same temple of supercilious liberalism I lambasted in an earlier screed of mine. Say hello to Pair of Strange Bedfellows #2.

Needless to say, no such outcry was ever raised over the caricature of a caged, trussed-up John McCain being poked with sharpened bamboo sticks by President Bush and Senators Clinton and Obama, clad in Viet Cong-style black pyjamas, featured in last month’s issue of Rolling Stone magazine:






















Surely I needn’t point out how grotesque and disgraceful this cartoon was, especially when one considers that Rolling Stone—the hip, youthful, sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll, rage-against-the-machine liberal counterpart to the effete New Yorker—unquestionably meant for it to be taken quite literally. I am unsure when half a decade spent being tortured by communist jailers in the service of one’s country became an appropriate object of mockery and derision. What I am reasonably certain of is that Senator Obama himself has shown a great deal more good sense in his own personal response to the flap over the New Yorker’s cover than have his throngs of disciples. In his interview with CNN’s Larry King tonight, Obama coolly commented, “It’s a cartoon...and that’s why we’ve got the First Amendment. And I think the American people are probably spending a little more time worrying about what’s happening with the banking system and the housing market and what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, than a cartoon. So I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it…I’ve seen and heard worse. I do think that…in attempting to satirize something, they probably fueled some misconceptions about me instead. But, you know, that was their editorial judgment.”

As tempted as I am to dismiss this reaction—unimpeachably lucid and sagacious to the untrained eye and ear—as just so much good-goody posturing, I have to conclude that it is sincere, given that it suits the generally unflappable demeanor of the Democrats’ newly minted nominee. If only the good Senator’s followers would take a page from his book on this matter.

Aha...

Today's Washington Post featured an article by E.J. Dionne that began by asking, "If the long conservative era that began with Ronald Reagan's election is over, will the judges appointed during the right's ascendancy be able to block, frustrate and undermine the efforts of a new progressive majority?" In a nutshell, Mr. Dionne spends the next thirteen paragraphs answering this question with a resounding "probably".

He may very well turn out to be right, and I share his belief that unelected conservative judges have no business thwarting the clearly expressed democratic will of the American people based on their own personal ideological biases. Almost needless to say, however, Mr. Dionne entirely ignores the myriad cases with which the jurisprudential landscape is littered in which liberal judges did just that. This is not to mention the, shall we say, rather overstated litany of potential horrors he fears a more right-leaning Court may perpetrate which he parades in front of the reader.

"It's not hard to imagine the cases that conservatives would bring against laws passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a President Barack Obama," Dionne writes. "Why wouldn't a movement that has tried to eviscerate wetlands laws and the Endangered Species Act challenge cap-and-trade legislation aimed at dealing with global warming? If Congress ever passed a "card-check" law to make it easier for unions to organize, those who never much liked the minimum wage or collective bargaining would certainly try to overturn the new labor right in court. And what would be the legal fate of new regulations on banking called forth by the economic devastation of the subprime mess, or bank bailouts that may be necessary to keep capitalism on track, or mandatory mortgage renegotiations to keep people from being thrown out of their homes?"

It's quite the doomsday scenario our friend has painted for us, isn't it? Well. While I wouldn't quite put it past legions of fulminating right-wing lawyers to mount constitutional challenges to many, or perhaps even most, or perhaps even all of the afore-enumerated liberal policies, I rather suspect that the odds are against the Court's striking down many, if any, of them on constitutional grounds. Let us disregard the obvious riposte that few or no such challenges could honestly be said to be grounded in the Constitution's written strictures--after all, this would prove no great obstacle to truly activist judges, even those of a conservative bent. Mr. Dionne, I think, has greatly overestimated the conservatism of today's Supreme Court. There are still only four reliable, consistent conservatives on the Court today: the boilerplate-spewing Thomas, the old originalist warhorse Scalia, and the new kids on the block, Roberts and Alito. As last week's decision rejecting the death penalty as punishment for the unspeakably brutal rape of a young girl showed, this right-wing cohort is more than effectively counterbalanced by the aging liberal luminaries Stevens, Souter, Breyer and Ginsburg. Chief Narcissist Kennedy, meanwhile, ricochets between liberal and conservative positions with merry abandon. Today's Court isn't right-wing; it's polarized, is what it is.

That may change, of course, should John McCain pull off the remarkable feat of winning the presidency--and the right to make Supreme Court nominations for at least the next four years with it. I say "may change" rather than "will change" simply because it is not unheard of for a president to grossly misperceive the true ideological leanings and judicial philosophy of one of his appointees to the Court. (The incorrigibly liberal David Souter was, after all, appointed by the first President Bush on the mistaken expectation--fed by Souter's own nomination hearing testimony--that he would hew to the conservative, "originalist" wing of the bench.) Nonetheless, even this possibility hardly gets Mr. Dionne off the hook, since as the above excerpt from his article shows, the scenario he draws presupposes the accession of a certain apostle of Audacious Hope to the Oval Office.

Even if McCain should beat the odds and win the White House, however, and eventually dispatch more conservative gavel-pounders to One First Street Northeast, Washington, D.C., and said Justices do deep-six a slew of liberal pet projects, it will still prove my essential argument. Because if this (unlikely) scenario does play out, we can rely upon Mr. Dionne and his co-ideologues to condemn said jurisprudence, in the strongest terms, as a form of "judicial activism" or "judicial overreach"--which is precisely what it would be. It would be a golden opportunity for right-wingers to puff up their chests and say, "So, you liberals want to appoint judges who'll legislate from the bench? Well, two can play at that game!" This would be just the rude awakening liberals need as to how judicial activism lends itself just as well to right-wing causes as to left-wing ones, and prove that the intrinsic principle on which such activism ultimately rests is neither liberalism nor conservatism, but quite simply the raw, virtually unchecked power of the judges themselves. May such a turn of events finally open liberals' eyes to the folly of allowing unelected and unaccountable judges to remake the Constitution in their own ideological image and likeness. Now that is an audacious hope indeed.