Trudeau Calls the Election

from FOXNews:'Doonesbury' Strip Predicts Obama Win on Tuesday

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- It's not exactly "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN," but some newspaper editors are pondering how to deal with a "Doonesbury" comic strip to be published the day after the election that assumes Barack Obama will win the presidency.

Comic creator Garry Trudeau delivered a series of strips for next week's papers showing his characters reacting to an Obama victory. But he offered no such option in the event of a comeback by John McCain, who's trailing Obama in the polls.

Trudeau's syndicator is offering papers a series of rerun strips from August. But the Obama story line is forcing some editors to question whether "Doonesbury" could put them in a spot -- albeit in the funny pages -- similar to 1948, when the Chicago Daily Tribune infamously declared in huge, front-page type that Republican Thomas Dewey had beaten Democrat Harry Truman for the presidency.

Honestly, there's probably no need for Trudeau to do 'McCain Wins' strips--even if McCain pulls off the upset, Trudeau can just write them off as another of Mike's Summer Dream Sequences--just later in the year than normal or something. Frankly, it's probably better if he doesn't do 'McCain Wins'--they'd be too full of vitriol to be worth reading.

Tim Bannon, editor of the Chicago Tribune's Live! section, where the paper's comics usually run, said the strip won't appear in the comics section because of deadline issues but might end up on another page.

"If McCain wins, we would never run it," he said. "If Obama were to win, we would try to see if we can get it in somehow in some other place. ... It strikes us as being a little strange to have that strip if that's not how it ends up. It's not like he hedged it so it works either way."

Kathie Kerr, a spokeswoman for the Kansas City-based Universal Press Syndicate, said about a dozen calls have come in from newspaper editors.

"They're still coming in," Kerr said Friday. "After we got the initial inquiries, we asked Garry to pick substitutes for the editors who were not comfortable with running the strips."

Trudeau, who lives in New York, said he might have provided papers with a McCain option if the election were a toss-up. But, he said, at the time he drew the strip, poll analysts were giving McCain less than a 4 percent chance of winning.

"From a risk-assessment viewpoint, I felt comfortable with the odds," Trudeau said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "The way I see it, if Obama wins, I'm in the flow and commenting on an extraordinary phenomenon.

"If he loses, there'll be such a national uproar that a blown call in a comic strip won't be much noticed. Besides, I'll be the one with the egg on my face -- not the editors."

He's absolutely right about that--as popular as the strip is, particularly with left-leaning journalists, politicians and journalists seem to love to dogpile on anything semi-controversial he writes.

Naedine Hazell, assistant managing editor of features and business for The Hartford Courant in Connecticut, dismissed the fuss over the Obama strips. The Courant plans to run the series.

"It's a comic. I don't think people necessarily expect accuracy in comics. There's all sorts of wack stuff in comics," Hazell said.

"I don't think Snoopy actually flies his doghouse either."

Brilliant analysis, most of us don't think that cats love lasagna, advertising executives who are thin as rakes eat sandwiches that are 4' tall, and cavemen were Evangelical Christians. But fer cryin' out loud, lady--Schultz is writing a different kind of strip! I agree with your call to run them as Trudeau wrote them, I'm just insulted by that reasoning. If an editor can't tell the difference between Schultz's world of hyper-intelligent dogs and birds, and Trudeau's biting political satire--well, that might go a long way in demonstrating why American newspapers are in decline.