Obama attacks The New Yorker:

If you turned on TV news early last week, it would have been difficult for you not to hear about the now-infamous cover of July 21 issue of The New Yorker magazine.Odds are good, too, that you heard pundits denounce the cover as tasteless, offensive and possibly racist. Even liberal commenter like Keith Olbermann of MSNBC jumped on the bandwagon.

Better TV news outlets, and most print outlets, noted that The New Yorker's official reply was that the cover was satire. Which, of course, it was, since not only does the magazine show a consistent contempt for right-wing politics, but also the illustrator, Barry Blitt, has done several political cartoon covers over the years.

Last week's cartoon shows presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama dressed as a Middle Easterner, fist-bumping his wife, who wears an assault rifle and military fatigues. The scene is in the Oval Office, where a portrait of Osama bin Laden hangs in the background above a fireplace where Old Glory burns.

Previous Blitt covers include former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being approached in a men's room in the manner of Sen. Larry Craig (Oct. 8, 2007); Vice President Dick Cheney getting his blood pressure read according to the Department of Homeland Security's colored threat level scale (Aug. 30, 2004); and President Bush playing a maid to Cheney in "The Odd Couple" (Dec. 5, 2005).

Whether Blitt's cartoon is offensive is hardly worth considering. Yes, of course it is; it's meant to be. By being offensive, the cartoon shows how deplorable the right-wing smears on Obama are. It would be no different than if Blitt had depicted Obama as a slave, calling attention to the racism implicit in other smears against Obama's character.

What is worth attention is something few in the media are recognizing: Obama's campaign could have, and should have, thanked The New Yorker for ridiculing the same lies that have forced the campaign to establish fightthesmears.com.

So why didn't they? More importantly, why did Obama's rhetoric join those of the pundits in implicitly calling for the censorship of The New Yorker by encouraging people not to purchase the magazine, to cancel their subscriptions and to otherwise smear the staff of the publication in the same way as their satirical depiction?

My guess is that Obama's camp didn't want people reading the absolutely exquisite cover story by Ryan Lizza printed about their candidate's formative first campaigns in the gritty world of Chicago politics. They might also have not appreciated Hendrik Hertzberg's commentary on Obama's flip-flopping, although he was mostly sympathetic to Obama.

Among other things, Lizza's feature story depicts Obama benefiting from the gerrymandering of Illinois in advance of his senatorial bid, his "dreadful" relations with some black colleagues in the Illinois Senate and his screwing over of Alice Palmer when winning his state Senate seat.

What might be the most disturbing to the Obama camp is Lizza's conclusion that "perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them." Lizza goes on to write, "He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game."

Perhaps that's what Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton thought was truly "tasteless and offensive" about the issue. Not the cover, which is clearly and without question a satirical political cartoon not only worthy of a New Yorker cover, but also typical of one. Not the satire of the right wing.

I think Obama's campaign was worried about people realizing that, essentially, Lizza's article nails the Obama candidacy. Lizza's article explains why progressives are starting to back away from Obama as a hero figure. It explains why Obama chose not to filibuster the telecom immunity legislation.

And it also explains why Obama's campaign fell back on the old political standard of smearing and promoting censorship rather than addressing the issues.

"It was a district where you had to campaign solely on those issues," Lizza quotes Emil Jones saying of Obama's 1996 state Senate campaign. "And Barack did not campaign that way, and so as a result he lost."

If that's truly the type of candidate Obama is, then it is lamentable that John McCain is his opponent. Otherwise, it might not be such a bad thing if Obama were to lose this campaign, too.