This Week's Sneak Peek

Hi there, folks!

I will have a regularly scheduled editorial cartoon this week, and it will have something to do with election season, but I'm afraid it won't be about tomorrow's vice presidential candidates' debate. I wish they would schedule these things on Sundays so that I can have a timely cartoon about them, but this year's debates have all been in the middle of the week.

I'll be away at the combined convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and the Association of Canadian Cartoonists in Montréal later this week, so I may not have time before I pack up and leave to draw, scan, and colorize a cartoon about whatever transpires between Messrs. Vance and Walz tomorrow night.

Which would disappoint me if I can't. Vice presidential debates historically make little to no difference in the outcome of an election, but tend to have some of the most memorable moments.

Lloyd Bentsen crushing Dan Quayle: "I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." 

Adm. James Stockdale: "Who am I? Why am I here?"

John Edwards: "I think the Vice President and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And and you can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It's a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy. ...."
Gwen Ifill (after Edwards finished criticizing Republicans' proposed Definition of Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution): "Mr. Vice President, you have 90 seconds."
Dick Cheney: "Let me simply thank the Senator for the kind words he said about my family and our daughter. I appreciate that very much."
Ifill: "That's it?"
Cheney: "That's it."

Sarah Palin: "In my comment there, it was a lame attempt at a joke and yours was a lame attempt at a joke, too, I guess, because nobody got it."

And who can forget the fly on Mike Pence's hair?

This Week's Sneak Peek

If you were expecting me to jump on the bandwagon with a smart aleck cartoon about J.D. Vance waxing prosaic about Sofa King Unlimited in his memoir, Hillbilly Allergy, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed.

That was just someone else's joke.

Like Sarah Palin being able to see Russia from her house.

Or George W. Bush saying "strategery."

Or Al Gore claiming to have invented the internet.

Or Gerald Ford being a klutz.

Of course, Ford did actually stumble on the Air Force One stairs a few times. But so has Joe Biden.

You'd think someone would have fixed those stairs by now.

Saturday through the Looking Glass with Alice

Detail from cartoon in Manitou Messenger, St. Olaf College, Northfield MN, Oct. 23, 1980

This week's syndicated cartoon was a parody of an illustration by Sir John Tenniel of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. That is a source I've drawn from quite a few times over the years: Carroll's psychedelic absurdities fit all manner of political shenanigans, and Tenniel's artwork set the standard for Aliciana. (Besides, one doesn't have to contend with Disney Inc.'s lawyers.)

 

"You Are Old, Ronald Reagan" is a parody of Carroll's parody of a poem; the original extolled the benefits of virtuous living for longevity. 

There was considerable talk about Ronald Reagan's age when he ran for president in 1980. Reagan was 69 years old on Inauguration Day 1981, taking the title of Oldest President At Inauguration from the previous record holder, William Henry Harrison (aged 68 and still the record holder for Briefest Presidency). 

Pikers both! Joe Biden is 78, and thus older today than Reagan was on the day he left office. Trump is 74. And of the other candidates we could have elected, four are older than Reagan was when I drew the above cartoon: Bernie Sanders is 79, Elizabeth Warren is 71, and Michael Bloomberg will celebrate his 79th birthday in February.

Unpublished, February, 1987

Here are two excerpts from a Lewis Carroll themed cartoon I started, but never finished, to comment on the Reagan administration in 1987. The Tower Report depicted the president as disengaged from the Iran-Contra scandal; meanwhile, it was supposedly First Lady Nancy Reagan who had insisted upon the firing of Don Regan as her husband's Chief of Staff.

Unpublished, February, 1987

In Through the Looking Glass, Alice encounters Humpty Dumpty, who sermonizes on his idiosyncratic definition of the word "glory." 

in NorthCountry Journal, Poynette WI, April, 1988

It is not one of the better known episodes in Carroll's books, and certainly not as popular as the nursery rhyme about Mr. Dumpty's fall. I have nevertheless used it twice (here and in a cartoon about Mitt Romney) because it comes in especially handy when Republicans give their policies an intentionally misleading name: such as crafting legislation to make polluting easier and calling it "The Clear Skies Act of 2003," for example.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, October, 1997

Elsewhere in Through the Looking Glass, Alice's encounter with Tweedledum and Tweedledee is well-known, if only because editorial cartoonists find it the perfect metaphor for any two entities that are supposed to be separate and distinct, but aren't. Indeed, the danger in using such an obvious metaphor increases the possibility that some other cartoonist might use the same image to express the same point about the same news item.

Q Syndicate, March, 2011

One way to avoid that possibility is to take the reference and stretch it out beyond its original limits.

Finally, I made use of Carroll's "Jabberwocky" a couple of times this year, in the background of a pair of cartoons about the presidential and vice presidential debates.

So Long As She's a Gentleman

"Pogo" by Walt Kelley, March 9, 1960

Senecaback Saturday offers a break from coronavirus (save to observe that there really was a St. Corona, and she really is the patron saint of pandemics. You can make this stuff up, but why would you?).

Instead, keeping in mind that March is Women's History Month, let's consider the history of women running for president of the United States.

Partisans of Senator Elizabeth Warren have complained that her late lamented presidential campaign was doomed by sexism. She entered the race amply qualified to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Not only did she have her plans, she was every bit a lefty as Bernie Sanders but without wearing the Socialist label.

Sexism in these matters being nothing new, of course...

"The Age of Brass" by Currier and Ives, 1869

Women couldn't even vote for president until 1869, and that was only in Wyoming. Elsewhere, female suffrage was pooh-poohed as a fantastically ludicrous idea, so Wyoming had to drive a hard bargain to keep women's right to vote when the territory was admitted as a state. Nevertheless, they persisted.

"An Unexpected Effect" by Charles J. Budd in Harper's Weekly, May 18, 1912

Jeannette Pickering Rankin was the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (R-MT) in 1916, four years before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. She ran unsuccessfully for the Senate two years later as a third-party candidate, losing partly because she had voted against U.S. entry into World War I. She was elected to Congress again in 1940, in time to vote against U.S. entry into World War II.

Uncaptioned, by Sidney Maxell for Guy Gannett Publishing Co., Portland, ME, October 29, 1950

In the years after ratification of the 19th Amendment (and even beforehand), a few women ran for president on minor party tickets. The first to try for the nomination of either the Republican or Democratic party was Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) in 1964. [Update: but see also here: Lucy Page Gaston was on the GOP ballot in 1920, if only in South Dakota.] Floated as a possible running mate with Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, Chase Smith's high water mark in '64 was garnering 25% of the vote in the Illinois primary; placed in nomination at the GOP convention, she refused to withdraw her name from the final ballot, thus denying Barry Goldwater a unanimous nomination.

Jack Davis for Time magazine, January 31, 1972

Eight years later, Representative Shirley Chisholm (D-NY; the woman in Jack Davis's cartoon) was the second. Chisholm was less successful but won a meaningless "beauty contest" primary in New Jersey; still, she came in fourth when delegates voted at the Democratic National Convention.

"Mirror, Mirror on the Wall" by Pat Oliphant, August 25, 1987

The presidential campaign of Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-CO) in 1987 didn't get beyond the exploratory stage, sorely disappointing editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant. Oliphant has never spared complimentary cartoons lightly, so this one is a rarity. His Puck, however, unintentionally brings up a standard by which male presidential candidates are hardly ever judged.

"Doonesbury" by Garry Trudeau, May 28, 1999

Elizabeth "Liddy" Dole, a twice former cabinet secretary and the wife of retired Senator Bob Dole, declared her candidacy for the 2000 GOP nomination. She came in a distant third to heir apparent George W. Bush and Steve Forbes in the Iowa straw poll in August of 1999 and withdrew in October. She might well have been Dubya's vice president if the guy Bush put in charge of finding his running mate hadn't decided there was no better choice than the man in the mirror.

"Of Course I Do," July, 1984

Backing up a bit, and turning to my own cartoons, a woman had made it onto a major party ticket in 1984. Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro of New York as his running mate. What should have been a bold, historical move was tempered by the impression that Mondale had been pressured into his choice by the National Organization of Women and the National Women's Political Caucus.

"Sarah's the One," September, 2008

John McCain didn't have that problem when he chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his VP candidate. If anything, she seemed to be more popular with Republicans than he was. Her folksy, in-your-face style wowed party regulars while striking outsiders as fairly ridiculous. The "Caribou Barbie" moniker was sexist and unfair, but oh so deliciously clever. And, frankly, no worse than Dan Quayle had to endure.

"So Happy to Be Back in Waterloo," July, 2011

Another woman who ran for the Republican nomination and earned merciless ridicule was Minnesota's Michele Bachmann. Citing various outrageous statements she had made in Congress and on the campaign trail, Chris Wallace actually asked her on Fox News Sunday, "Are you a flake?" There was, however, a moment when she was leading polls of GOP voters, and she won the 2011 Iowa straw poll — but she ended up coming in sixth in the actual caucuses there in January, and dropped out of the race.

"That Time of Year Again," February, 2007

And so we come to Hillary Clinton. Having paid her dues as First Lady and then Senator from New York, 2008 was supposed to be her year. Unfortunately, she had gained a reputation for being overly calculating. Ruining her plans, Barack Obama swept the Democratic Party, which tends to have a thing for bright, shiny, new, exciting candidates (well, not this year, obviously), off its feet.

Besides, had she won, future historians would have been puzzled why the United States decided for an entire quarter century that the best it could do were Clintons and Bushes.

"I Don't Get It," March, 2016

Eight years later, she was back as the Democrats' heiress apparent. And we know how that came out.

Remembering John McCain

Sedonaback Saturday had intended to bring you a Back-to-School edition, but that will have to wait for another day. Instead, I've selected a handful of cartoons I've drawn about Arizona Republican John S. McCain III over the years. 

Due to the nature of political cartooning, these are not all flattering. The form does not lend itself well to flattery, and McCain was a complex, sometimes contradictory character. In these first two, however, he joined with freshman Senator from Wisconsin, Democrat Russ Feingold, in a valiant effort to combat the overbearing influence of corporate and Political Action Committee "soft money" in politics.

McCain came to the issue having been singed in the Keating Five scandal, involving favors for a Savings and Loan which ultimately failed during the S&L crisis of the late 1980's. A Senate Ethics Committee investigation cleared McCain of any criminal wrong-doing, but he would admit, "The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."

McCain-Feingold was a tough sell on Capitol Hill. A version of the bill eventually passed in 2002, but was overturned by the Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United ruling in 2010. But it is only one example of how John McCain, holding true to his conservative principles, would reach across the aisle to even the most liberal of Democrats to achieve a common goal.

In 1999, with McCain-Feingold yet to become law, McCain announced his first run for the presidency. Differentiating himself from the rest of the Republican field, he was receptive to interests of the LGBT Log Cabin Republicans, securing their endorsement early on.

Indeed, he was willing to speak up on behalf of LGBT members of his party, notably former Congressman Jim Kolbe. But on issues of interest to LGBT voters generally, there was little difference between him and the other front runners.

He hadn't changed his position on gays in the military by the time he announced his second run for the White House eight years later. If anything, he tacked even more closely to religious right orthodoxy on LGBT issues.

But McCain was not a follower of the scorched earth policy that has come into vogue with Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party, and the Corrupt Trump Administration. In addition to leading the fight for campaign finance reform with Russ Feingold, he worked with John Kerry on normalizing relations with Vietnam, and with Ted Kennedy and later the bipartisan "Gang of Eight" in a vain attempt to reform our immigration system. He seriously considered naming Independent Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate in 2008.

The clip of him correcting a woman at one of his campaign rallies who said she would never trust Barack Obama because "he's an Arab" — McCain called him a "decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues" — has been viewed and debated on TV and social media many times this week. He also defended 2004 Democratic presidential nominee and fellow Vietnam veteran John Kerry against the scurrilous "Swift Boat" attack ads.

“I deplore this kind of politics,” McCain said. “I think the ad is dishonest and dishonorable. As it is, none of these individuals served on the boat [Kerry] commanded. Many of his crew have testified to his courage under fire. I think John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam. I think George Bush served honorably in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.”

But anyone who claims he was anything other than a loyal Republican is full of crap. He voted for every GOP tax cut, for Dubya's war in Iraq, to remove Bill Clinton from office, and for 83% of the Trump Agenda. His 2010 campaign ads even called for posting the U.S. military along the Mexican border and "build[ing] the damn fence."

McCain had lost the 2000 nomination to George W. Bush in part due to a Karl Rove push-poll asking South Carolina voters "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" (He hadn't.) He was deeply offended by the libelous attack. His literal embrace of Bush at the 2008 convention may have dented his reputation for being a "maverick," but it is indicative of the brand of loyalty, surpassing personal grievance, he believed in.

Perhaps it takes being a maverick to display that kind of loyalty any more. His fellow Republicans seemed to be more thrilled with his selection of Sarah Palin as running mate than they were with having him at the head of the ticket. The gravitational pull within the GOP then and now has been toward the doggedly anti-intellectual, semi-literate, vituperative and even fact-free style she epitomized.

You hadn't heard him once say a critical word of Mrs. Palin in the ten years since (although in his final memoir, he regretted not having stuck with the idea of running with Lieberman). The style of Republicanism currently in vogue is not the future he saw for this country in his farewell message:

"We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of ideals rather than trust them to be the great force for change that they have always been.
"We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do. ...
"Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history.
"We make history."

The Long Road to Overnight Victory: Part III

Part 3: The Republicans Don't

In today's Walkback Wednesday feature, we look at the Republican party's role in doing everything possible to thwart marriage equality, marriage equivalence, marriage parity, marriage approximation, and on and on and on.

Once the federal "Defense of Marriage Act" was passed in 1996, battles over marriage equality were mainly fought on the state and local level. Nationally, it was a big issue for the religious right, but as for congressmen and senators, it was just one more component of an antigay agenda along with keeping gays out of the military and the Boy Scouts, and making sure we couldn't adopt children. Oh, and there was impeaching President Clinton to keep Republicans busy.

There are a few antigay politicians in the above cartoon from January, 1998: Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), Pat Buchanan, Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA), and House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) are closest to the foreground. Barr was the author of the DOMA, although he would repudiate it as presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party ten years after this cartoon was drawn.

With the election (by five lawyers) of a president who was a friend of the religious right, Republicans continued their pushback against marriage equality. When he came up for reelection, George W. Bush, with his Brain Karl Rove (and gay quisling Ken Mehlman) needed an issue to fire up his base, and Republicans were ready, willing and eager to run with it:

A more liberal Republican, namely California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who didn't have to worry as much about appealing to Christian conservatives as Republicans who might aspire to the highest office in the land do, dared to warm to the idea of domestic partnerships. But that was about as far as it went.

Schwarzenegger, however, was pretty much an anomaly in the Republican party. He was never going to run for office outside of California, and Republicans were relieved just to have one of their own in charge of a solidly blue state, so he didn't have to toe the GOP's hard-core antigay line. The party's presidential hopefuls last time around, on the other hand, were not at all shy in that regard.

It didn't take much to remind LGBT voters that while it didn't make any difference which Republican ended up getting nominated for president, it makes a world of difference who sits in the Oval Office when the election is over.

QToon: Absolutely Comfortable

There was certainly no question what I would draw this week's cartoon about. Sure, there was the Washington Post story about Mitt Romney's having once pinned a gay (as it turned out) fellow student to the ground and cut off his golden locks, but I had just drawn a Romney cartoon last week -- and besides, this Clay Bennett cartoon says everything that needs to be said about those high school hijinx.

The only real complication was that with President Obama's ABC interview on marriage equality hitting the news last Tuesday afternoon, by the time I got around to drawing my little weekly cartoon, all the other cartoonists (and late night comedians) around the country had taken all the good ideas. And a lot of the lame ones, too, if we're being totally honest here.

I had six different cartoons sketched out on good bristol board Sunday night (the cartoon is due at Q Syndicate on Monday morning) before I finally decided which one was worth inking. While the final cartoon succumbs to the liberal fault of being too wordy to be witty, rest assured that the rejected cartoons were no better.

Oh, I suppose I could have drawn a cartoon about Bristol Palin. But she's such a poor spokesperson for marriage, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Who could possibly improve on Eric Mapa's tweet: "Bristol Palin's just jealous because I'm actually married to the father of my baby"?

Did WI Cartoonist Illegally Impersonate Legislator?

On Saturday, February 25, Wisconsin State Assemblyman Steve Nass did not send a press release to the (Madison) Capital Times.

The press release came from Wisconsin labor cartoonist Mike Konopacki. Upset that Nass had successfully forced the University of Wisconsin's School for Workers to cancel a display of posters and artwork from the protests launched in reaction to Governor Darth Snotwalker's attacks on state workers, Konopacki created a fake press release purportedly from the La Grange Republican. Tweaking quotations by Nass and his press secretary, Konopacki's fake press release reported that Nass wanted the Smithsonian Institution to remove pro-labor material from the National Museum of American History.

Konopacki mailed the gag release, appearing under a Photoshopped facsimile of the Assemblyman's official letterhead, to Cap Times editor John Nichols -- who mistook it for the real thing, and reported it on the Cap Times's web site as a genuine news item.

The report was only on line for 40 minutes, but that was long enough for Nass to sic the law on Konopacki for:

946.69 Falsely assuming to act as a public officer or employee or a utility employee...
(2) Whoever does any of the following is guilty of a Class I felony:
(a) Assumes to act in an official capacity or to perform an official function, knowing that he or she is not the public officer or public employee or the employee of a utility that he or she assumes to be.

I can't wait to see whether Sarah Palin tries the same tack against Julianne Moore.

Almost This Week's Q Cartoon

This is the cartoon I was drawing for Q Syndicate last week in hopes of being able to send it to Q Syndicate before the July 4 weekend. My preference was to have something about Rhode Island's new civil partnership law, but I wasn't happy with the ideas I had been working with. Eventually, of course, I came up with the idea for the cartoon I posted yesterday; that idea was more relevant to LGBT issues than this one, so I put this cartoon aside.

I've commented before that I find women harder to caricature than men. Beyond the age of, say, 25, men don't change their hairstyles as often as women do (except insofar as nature forces change upon us); and women wear make-up to alter the perception of their facial contours.

So far, the best caricatures of Michele Bachmann I've seen have been by John Branch, Taylor Jones, and, not surprisingly, Minneapolis Star Tribune cartoonist Steve Sack, who has had the most experience drawing her. (The June 16 cartoon linked to above, however, isn't a great example, but she has not been inspiring him much lately, I guess.) The rest of us cartoonists are still flailing about trying to fit her features together.

Meanwhile, there is this bizarre cartoon from Terry Wise, trying to nominate himself for a Pulitzer. (It would run counter to the conservatives-get-no-respect meme to remember that doctrinaire conservative cartoonist Michael Ramirez is a two-time Pulitzer winner, as are Steve Breen and the late Jeff MacNelly.) His point, aside from Any Two Things Make a Cartoon, seems to be that it's sexist for liberals to point out the ditzy things that come out of the mouths of Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin.

Conservatives, as you will all remember, have been perfect gentlemen about female politicians. Conservatives in the media have never said a sexist thing about Hilary Clinton, Janet Reno, Sonya Sotomayor or Nancy Pelosi, have they?

Q Toon: GOP Line-up

Unless the Republicans end up going for Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, or Rick Santorum, this could well be my first cartoon about next year's GOP nominee for President.

Santorum, for anyone struggling to figure out who is who in the cartoon, is the one barely in the frame. When I draw smut, I try to be tasteful about it.

Q Toon: Meanwhile, Back at the Vatican

On the Racine Post blog, a reader responded to my latest cartoon (on the Wisconsin gubernatorial race): "Walker raised taxes????? Walker passed the Wheel Tax in The City of Milwaukee, Tried to talk over MPS from the voters? Walker allow Billions of Gallons of untreated sewage into Lake Michigan?"

I posted a reply citing the One Wisconsin Now tax and fee figures reported in the Shepherd Express, and this person's response was, "Calling the Shepherd Express a newspaper is like calling the Journal Times a newspaper."

As tempted as I was to reply that a.) I hadn't called the Shepherd Express a newspaper, b.) the Shepherd Express and Journal Times print news on newsprint on a regular basis, which ought to define them as newspapers, and c.) whether or not they were newspapers was completely irrelevant -- especially in the case of the Journal Times, which wasn't part of the conversation at all -- as tempted as I was, I realized that to reply that way would send the discussion veering off on a useless tangent, the way so many internet discussions end up.

Then I realized that here we had the opportunity to provide a definition for Sarah Palin's new verb, to refudiate. To refudiate: to argue or to deny by changing the subject; to counter an argument with an unrelated accusation.

E.g.: "Bush administration policies caused the worst recession since 1929, and now Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to prevent President Obama from reversing those policies."
"Show me the birth certificate!"

"Sarah Palin says that America cannot achieve energy independence while federal regulations continue to discourage domestic exploration and extraction."
"Sarah Palin says she can see Russia from her house."

This week's Q Syndicate cartoon (above) is not an example of refudiation, however. It is rather an example of the Will & Grace school of comedy: creating a joke by making a gratuitous celebrity reference with no direct connection to the topic at hand.

Hopi Changey Stuff

I debated whether I ought to change the caption in this cartoon to more accurately reflect what Sarah Palin actually said to the Teabaggers over the weekend: "hopey changey stuff." But then, would I need to change the hand to "cynicky samy oldy policiesy ..." ?

The Wisdom of Sarah Palin

"If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?"

--Going Rogue, page 133