Doonesbury strip for Wednesday betting on Obama as winner Tuesday
6:52 PM Fri, Oct 31, 2008 | Permalink
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By John Hill Well, it looks like the first return for the presidential election is in, and Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau is calling the election for Barack Obama. In a strip sent to newspapers and set to run Wednesday morning after the election, Trudeau's comic features a group of servicemen watching the returns on television as the Democratic senator from Illinois is declared the winner and the nation's first black president. 
A panel from the Wednesday comic strip, published with permission For clients who prefer to write stories after the results are known, the strip has caused a little consternation among some of the 1,400 who subscribe to the strip, said Kathie Kerr, Universal Press Syndicate's vice president for communications. As of Friday afternoon, though, she said only about two dozen had called with questions or complaints. The syndicate is providing a replacement story line, a re-run of an obesity-theme cartoon from August, for papers that would like a replacement. "I couldn't let such a historic occasion go by without comment," Trudeau said in an e-mail, "and it seemed lame to try to do it without positing an outcome. Unlike the last election, which was a toss-up, the metrics this year make an Obama victory highly likely." "As a syndicate we thought it was a gutsy move," Kerr said. She said Trudeau felt comfortable with the prediction, particularly citing a polling analysis Web site called fivethirtyeight.com that pegs Republican John McCain's chances of winning at 3.7 percent. "The Providence Journal will be running the strip, Interim Executive Editor Thomas E. Heslin said. "It's just a cartoon," Heslin said. "It's the funny pages." "But I haven't looked to see what they're saying in Family Circus," he added. This is not the first time Doonesbury's timeliness has created dilemmas for newspapers.
In 1973 one of his characters, talking about the Watergate investigation, declared former Atty. Gen. John Mitchell as " Guilty. Guilty. Guilty." More recently, in 2005, some editors pulled or edited a strip in that referred to former President Bush aide Karl Rove by his presidential nickname of "Turd Blossom." In 2004, Kerr said at least 20 papers objected to a strip in which Vice President Dick Cheney used the F-word, rendered mostly in dashes. That Trudeau was willing to go out on the prediction limb is not surprising, and a reason the strip has remained popular after it started more than 30 years ago, said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. "Doonesbury, this was something that was relevant during Vietnam," he said. "We've had Vietnam, Watergate, a lot of presidents and now, by God we're talking about him again." "That's Garry Trudeau's brand identity," he said. "Just like Crest is minty fresh." 
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