Toon: Hocus Pocus

This year's vice presidential candidates more or less held their own during their debate performance the other evening, or at least that's the conventional wisdom so far. They voiced agreement with each other several times and mostly avoided patently obvious lies on a Trumpian scale.

Which, since Trump got his whopper about Haitian immigrant petivores from his running mate, is remarkable.

For vice presidential candidates, Job Number One is not to fnck up. Check, and check.

Job Number Two is to brown-nose the boss. For JD BH Vance, that meant pretending that the Corrupt Trump Administration™ was a halcyon quadrennium of universal peace, bipartisan comity, and economic miracles. (Pay no attention to Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, Sudan, impeachments I and II, Nancy Pelosi tearing up a state of the union speech, cramming dogmatic right-wingers onto the Supreme Court, and a nation struggling to find toilet paper, diapers, infant formula, and places to bury COVID fatalities.) 

Why, Trump even saved Obamacare, and we didn't even notice it at the time! It just goes to show what a modest fellow Donald J. Trump truly is.

Late in the debate, after Vance risibly claimed that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January the 20th,” Tim Walz tried to get Vance to confess that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. But Vance refused to take the bait, replying instead, “Tim, I’m focused on the future.”

His focus on the past is mighty gauzy, that's for sure.

Q Toon: Ad Insultiam

There's a month to go until Election Day, and Republicans have broken out the transphobia on TV.

The Trump campaign has begun running trans-bashing ads charging that Kamala Harris supports transgender therapy for children "without their parents' consent," as well as gender corrective surgery for prison inmates and undocumented immigrants. The ads include footage of Harris answering questions from a transgender interviewer (Wait — isn't the Republican knock on Harris that she won't sit down for interviews?) followed by still shots of her with drag performers — at least one of which doesn't look photoshopped together — and Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine.

You may not recognize Levine’s name; but transphobes find her every bit as frightening as those of us on the other side found Roger Severino in Trump’s HHS. And rest assured that right-wing media are holding her up as a scary bugaboo every chance they can get.

Here in Wisconsin, Republican senatorial candidate Eric Hovde and the PACs supporting him have been running ads making the same accusations against Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin. One assumes that Republicans are running this as a one-size-fits-all ad against other Democrats in close races around the country; Baldwin just happens to be one of the most prominent LGBTQ+ candidates this year.

We creative types gripe about AI — Artificial Intelligence — infringing on our turf. Someone quipped something to the effect of AI allowing wealth access to creativity without allowing creativity access to wealth. Or something like that. I tried googling it, but Google just gave me inspirational quotations about attaining financial security.

Anyway, you'll miss us creative types when we're gone, I promise you. But nobody is going to shed a tear when AI puts the campaign admeisters out of work. I half suspect that the emails flooding my inbox from Sherrod Brown (personal!), Elisa Slotkin, Jon Tester, Tim Walz, Barack Obama, Michele Obama, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Adam Kinzinger, Gwen Walz, Doug Emhoff, Chasten Buttigieg, and Moo Dang, the baby hippopotamus, each of them supposedly writing me ten or twelve times a day, must be spewed forth from AI servers in Cupertino. Some guy probably fed in the parameters to Watson 9000 four or five years ago: show me a desperate candidate up against a funding deadline and facing a barrage of attacks by a menacing cabal threatening all that America holds dear. 

I doubt that anyone will shed a tear if and when the job of grinding out political attack ads gets snatched away from the Don Drapers and Darrin Stephenses of Madison Avenue and K Street. Turning the work over to soulless mainframes in the cloud instead of the soulless operatives doing it now might scarcely be noticed by the rest of us.

Unless we happen to spot the surplus fingers and triple-jointed hips in the grainy, slow motion, black-and-white videos of Candidates X.

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?

Keep Kartooning with Koolidge

Having caught up with the LaFollette and Davis campaigns last week, today our Graphical History Tour checks in with President Calvin Coolidge and his whirlwind campaign for a full four years in the White House.

by Charles "Bill" Sykes in Life magazine, Oct. 2 1924

Charles Sykes here scoffs at President Calvin Coolidge's campaign message of "common sense" government. Coolidge whistles past the political issues burying ground, haunted by tariff troubles, scandals left over from the Harding presidency, the Ku Klux Klan, and "our foreign policy."

"The Wide Open Spaces" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sept. 29, 1924

Of the four, the Klan was certainly not a dead issue. The secretive society wielded influence not just in the solidly Democratic south, but had also made significant inroads in the Republican Party, winning gubernatorial and senate primaries in Indiana and Maine. But Democratic and Progressive leaning cartoonists lambasted Coolidge for not speaking out against the Klan.

by Grover Page in Louisville Courier-Journal, Oct. 13, 1924

Coolidge supposedly believed that his best option was to ignore the Klan and thus deprive it of the publicity a presidential statement would afford. His running mate, Charles Dawes, did speak out against the Klan, and forcibly so; as did John Davis and Robert LaFollette, the presidential nominees of the Democratic and Progressive Parties, respectively. When Coolidge finally did condemn the Klan by name, it was fully a year after this election was over.

"Silence Gives Consent" by J.P. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, Sept. 2, 1924

"Keep Kool with Koolidge" by Harold Talburt for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Sept. 13, 1924

In could be what we cartoonist call a "Yahtzee," J.P. Alley and Harold Talburt both depict a klansman proudly misspelling the Republicans' election slogan. Or perhaps Talburt brazenly swiped the idea from Alley, who drew it first.

"Still Klampaigning" by Harold Talburt for NEA, ca. Sept. 15, 1924

In fact, Talburt liked the idea so much that he made a week-long series out of it, adding a new character to the parade each day.

"Klampaigning—Knumber V" by Harold Talburt for NEA, ca. Sept. 17, 1924

By the end of the series, the parade behind the Klansman included former Ambassador to Great Britain George Harvey, Charles Dawes, New Hampshire Congressman Foster W. Stearns, campaign manager William Butler, and Coolidge himself bringing up the rear.

"The Actions of 'Silent Cal'" by Ed Gale in Los Angeles Times, Sept. 10, 1924

Okay, I was being sarcastic at the top of this post. "Silent Cal" waged no whirlwind campaign. He wasn't raising the roofs of auditoriums and airport tarmacs packed with cheering fans. To his mind, the way to be elected president was to get down to the work of being President.

"The Crew That Brought This Dirigible In" by Charles Kuhn in Indianapolis News, Oct. 17, 1924

Kuhn's cartoon here references the arrival at Lakehurst Naval Station of U.S. Navy dirigible USS Los Angeles, 81 hours after departing from its German construction site at Friedrichshafen, Germany. For those of you reading on tiny devices, the crew in Kuhn's cartoon are Stability, Prosperity, Common Sense Government, Economy, and Efficiency.

Oh, by the way, I have still not found any mention of the Klan from Mr. Kuhn.

"Ho, Hum" by J.P. Alley in Memphis Commercial Appeal, Sept. 20, 1924

Coolidge was satisfied to let his running mate take care of all the campaign speechifying, flesh-pressing, and, I presume, baby-kissing. If Dawes had any complaints about it, he confided them only to J.P. Alley.

Since I've brought up Mr. Dawes again, I'll mention that Iowa Senator Smith W. Brookhart touched off some fireworks by calling for Coolidge to dump him from the Republican ticket. Please excuse the mailing label here:

"What a Noisy World" by James Donahey in Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 2, 1924

Brookhart, one of those pesky Progressive Republicans, opined that Coolidge should replace Dawes, a diplomat and former Director of the Budget lauded for his proposal to resolve Europe's war reparations dispute, with someone from the "Farm Bloc."

Not that the Iowa Senator had any particular farm bloc politician in mind, of course.

Q Toon: Stefon Gets Political

Republiqans' gerrymandering since 2010 has emboldened their most radical elements to believe that they can successfully run their most extremist, oddball, weird candidates for statewide office as easily as they can in their hermetically sealed congressional and state legislative districts.

That they certainly can in states that are bent that way, and there are several from Alabama to Wyoming. It works elsewhere for offices voters pay little attention to, such as Secretary of State and Lieutenant Governor — especially where Democrats have left way-downballot, county level races woefully uncontested. But when it comes to the marquee races for Senator and Governor, the electorate actually sits up and pays attention. (Flooded with campaign commercials on every electronic device, how could we not?)

Republiqans thought they had a sure winner for one of Georgia's Senate seats two years ago in football star Herschel Walker, only to be stunned when a solid majority of voters discovered what a loony, intellectual lightweight he was. 

They seem destined for another shock if North Carolina voters fail to overlook gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson's antebellum ideas on women's suffrage and slavery. CNN has added to the mix, exposing posts by the self-described "Black Nazi" on a pornography website over a decade ago.

Walker was an unknown quantity as a candidate in Georgia beyond being a celebrity, so maybe one can cut Republiqan voters there some slack. But GOP voters in North Carolina have no excuse for not knowing what kind of person their Lieutenant Governor is. He has not been some Alexander P. Throttlebottom waiting quietly out of sight and out of mind. 

Robinson's inflammatory rhetoric caught more attention than your typical Lieutenant Governor ever gets. Heck, this is the fourth cartoon I've drawn about him, and I don't even live in North Carolina.

And I haven’t even mentioned that he is a Holocaust denier yet . 

Of course, time is short; but Tar Heel Republiqans could try stealing the national Democrats' playbook, and pressure their deeply flawed candidate to drop out so that they can replace him with someone else who is so much more appealing by comparison.

It's 2024. Anything can happen.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Looking through American, British, and Canadian editorial cartoons of the Nineteenth Century and up to cartoons from the Nixon era, one frequently runs across references from Shakespeare and Keats. Old German cartoons often quoted Schiller and Goethe. French cartoonists used to allude to Voltaire and Hugo.

Today's readership expects something with a somewhat lower brow.
 

1924 Challengers

Our Graphical History Tour returns again to the presidential contest of 1924, where we find Harold Talburt all fired up about Progressive nominee Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin.

"One Good Way to Save the Rug" by Harold Talburt for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Sept. 5, 1924

I could be wrong here, but my gut feeling is that a board with a nail in it is not the best tool for beating a rug, and one of them new-fangled vacuum cleaners would be more efficient and less damaging to boot. 

Before Kirby, Hoover, and Electrolux rendered them obsolete, there was a weapon called a carpet beater, consisting of metal loops flowering off the end of a wooden handle. Years later, one Henry E. Rutzebeck of Sunland, California reminisced about the old-fangled device to the Los Angeles Times:

“I remember beating the rug until my arms and shoulders were limp and my spirit demoralized,” he writes. “My mother would come out, give the object of my frustration one well-placed whack and, in a cloud of smoking dust, instruct: ‘Beat more!’ ”

He adds: “Today’s mass-produced rugs would never survive the ritual beatings such as we were trained to administer in the early ’20s.”

"Asking Too Much of the Girl" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Colliers, Sept. 13, 1924

Beating of the carpets was presumably well overdue in this Collier's magazine cartoon by "Ding" Darling. I presume it is Congress with so much "unfinished business," beset by "blocs" and an overflowing "waste" can. 

For better or worse, the 68th Congress had not been as completely unproductive as Darling portrays: it passed an onerous, racist immigration bill, but also acknowledged Native Americans as U.S. citizens. It also passed bills adjusting veterans' compensation and addressing water pollution. It was a modest output to be sure, but a model of efficiency and productivity compared to the Republican 118th Congress of today. Besides, the 68th Congress still had a lengthy lame duck session between Election Day and March 4, 1925 to hunker down and really get to work.

LaFollette's invitation to "The November Bride" to "live here with the folks until we can figure out something" will merit some further thought.

"We'd Like to Know" by William Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 25, 1924

William Hanny takes issue with a specific proposal of LaFollette's for congressional review of Supreme Court decisions. Given the conservative bent of the Court for most of its history, its resistance to most if not all Progressive legislation would have been extremely likely.

"Farmers Take Your Choice" probably by T.E. Powers for Star Co., ca. Sept. 26, 1924

I don't see a signature on this cartoon, but it looks to me like the work of T.E. Powers. A typical cartoon of his would have three loosely related panels like this one, so I wouldn't be surprised if the editors of the Oklahoma Leader selected the one panel they liked, or would fit on the page, and it didn't happen to be the panel with Powers's signature in it.

LaFollette stands proudly with his running mate, Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, who had led a special Senate committee investigating the Harding Administration's Teapot Dome scandal. (That's also Wheeler playing guitar in William Hanny's cartoon.) The Democratic presidential nominee John Davis, starting off on his campaign tour of western states, is joined by vice presidential nominee Governor Charles W. Bryan of Nebraska and Bryan's elder brother William Jennings Bryan.

"The Sailing Power of the Tail" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, Sept. 25, 1924

The elder Bryan, his party's standard bearer in 1896, 1900, and 1908, remained a Democratic power broker and a favorite of cartoonists. Adding the younger Bryan to the ticket was intended to neutralize the Prairie Populist's strong opposition to Davis.

"Carrying All Before It" by Robert Satterfield for Autocaster, ca. Sept. 19, 1924

It has been very difficult to find any cartoons confident in the Democratic ticket's chances in November, so Bob Satterfield lands here pretty much by default.

He seizes on new criminal charges against Harding administration officials connected to the Teapot Dome scandal as the basis for his optimism, but Coolidge had effectively disassociated himself from his predecessor's "Ohio Gang."

"Moral" by Charles Kuhn in Indianapolis News, Sept. 23, 1924

What concerned some Coolidge supporters such as Doc Kuhn was that the three-way race would end up with no candidate winning a majority in the electoral college, leaving the election up to Congress. And perhaps this was the possibility Darling was getting at in his Collier's cartoon.

Republicans held a majority in both the House (which, according to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, would elect the President) and Senate (which would elect the Vice President); but that includes several members aligned with the Progressive movement — not to mention Senators LaFollette and Wheeler themselves.

The precedent set 100 years earlier, when no candidate won an electoral college majority in the four-way race of 1824, suggests that there would have been plenty of wheeling and dealing in what is called a "contingent election." That earlier congress had managed to elect a president in one day.

On the other hand, in 1924, this was the Congress that had taken nine ballots to elect a Speaker of the House.

Again, a hasty decision compared to today's GOP QauQus.