Now that Barack Obama has made history, the president-elect can look forward to a long line of important issues vying for his attention once he takes the oath of office in January. But I'm hoping he'll elect to yield his considerable influence to affect some change before Inauguration Day in two key areas.
First and foremost, of course, I hope he'll reach out to those voters who did not vote for him, either out of genuine political differences, racial prejudice or brainwashing from the likes of Hannity, Limbaugh, etc. In the less than 12 hours since Sen. Obama gave his first speech as president-elect, I've received a number of distraught e-mails that are frankly disturbing in their level of vitriol. I'll be addressing that issue more directly in my Stop the Presses column in this weekend's issue of The Sunday Paper.
But almost as important, I call upon President-Elect Obama to pull some strings over at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and get "Doonesbury" back in the paper immediately. As you may have heard, cartoonist Garry Trudeau submitted a batch of comic strips in which Obama is named president. (Syndicated daily strips are usually turned in a few weeks in advance.) The AJC opted to pull the strip, placing it on hiatus this week, and resume running it Nov. 10.
Let's give Atlanta's monopoly daily the benefit of the doubt that this move wasn't politically motivated; the AJC endorsed Obama, after all. Even so, it's a baffling move, if not an unexpected one. After all, the AJC already segregates "Doonesbury" (along with the poorly drawn and execrable conservative strip "Prickly City") to another part of the Living section, away from the Comics page, fearing that its readers aren't sophisticated enough to process comic strips that espouse political opinions next to crap like "On A Claire Day." (No matter that "Get Fuzzy," for one, also addresses political matters via Bucky the Cat's right-wing rants. Heck, even "Brewster Rockit" had its title character run for president of the galaxy--why not segregate that one, as well? And "Mutts" pursues a clearly leftist pro-animal agenda. Maybe we should separate the Comics section into "right" and "left"-leaning strips. And don't even get me started on having to find the Business section just to read "Dilbert.")
Since those AJC customers who want to read "Doonesbury" are already forced to take the extra step of seeking it out, one can safely assume that most folks who
do read it are sympathetic to its leanings. And posters to "The Vent" notwithstanding, I think even those innocent naifs who stumble upon the strip by mistake are probably smart enough to recognize that it is a work of fiction.
Now that the results are in, and Obama has indeed won (to absolutely no one's surprise), the AJC should run the three strips readers have missed so far. It shouldn't have insulted its readers' intelligence in the first place. (
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