The MSM brain freeze caused by that infamous New Yorker cover cartoon has finally thawed and the humorless prigs who are in the tank for Barack Obama realized that it doesn’t look good when journalists denounce other journalists for exercising their free speech rights.  The Obama campaign also belatedly realized its reaction to the broad satire was “really dumb damage control,” writes Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times:  

It was a huge PR mistake by a campaign that doesn’t make many. The denunciations by both presidential campaigns accomplished one thing: They pushed a simple cartoon to the top of most-searched terms online and the top of the news lists of countless online sites, commentators, cable news shows, commentators and network TV newscasts for more than two days. No doubt it also helped the bottom line, boosting New Yorker single-copy sales this week. … 

But as a result of the campaign-induced uproar, that image has now been reproduced and received countless millions more voter impressions than the magazine itself could ever dream of. It’s been viewed hundreds of thousands of times already just on this blog. And, by the way, what was the Obama campaign doing calling the magazine, trying to get an apology, or intimidate someone? 

Instead of worrying that the cartoon included “every detail that the Obama campaign would like the world not to think about or associate with its guy,” as Malcolm puts it, Obama should have worried that his thin-skinned reaction will reinforce the uneasiness some voters feel that he isn’t tough enough to be Commander-in-Chief. And the punditocracy should have worried that their dissing “average” Americans as being too unsophisticated to understand that the cartoon was a send-up can only solidify the perception other voters have that Obama is an arugula-munching elitist who does not understand the concerns of workaday folk.  

No doubt there is some percentage of the electorate for whom the New Yorker cartoon is a portrait not a spoof, but if Obama doesn’t “close the sale” with those who still need to be convinced to vote for him it will be because they think he is a snobby wuss. 

Note: The Stiletto writes about politics and other stuff at The Stiletto Blog, chosen an Official Honoree in the Political Blogs category by the judges of the 12^th Annual Webby Awards (the Oscars of the online universe) along with CNN Political Ticker, Swampland (Time magazine) and The Caucus (The New York Times).