You thought Tina Brown was really going to bring the insanity to this week’s Newsweek cover, especially after she was one-upped by Time’s mind-scarring “Are you Mom Enough?” photo. But actually, the cover is relatively tame. The over-the-top Obama worship at these weeklies has lost its shock value, and the “First Gay President” line was a pundit trope as soon as Obama wrapped up his ABC interview last week. Politico’s Dylan Byers has the summary of Andrew Sullivan’s cover story:
It’s easy to write off President Obama’s announcement of his support for gay marriage as a political ploy during an election year. But don’t believe the cynics. Andrew Sullivan argues that this announcement has been in the making for years. “When you step back a little and assess the record of Obama on gay rights, you see, in fact, that this was not an aberration. It was an inevitable culmination of three years of work.” And President Obama has much in common with the gay community. “He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family,” Sullivan writes.
Obviously, this story was supposed to be a boost for Obama, but conservatives are already pointing out that the cover is a gift for Mitt Romney. Yes, the regular readership of Newsweek (and Andrew Sullivan) loves this sort of Obama fawning. But they’re not the only people who are going to see this, and they’re already voting for him anyway. This cover is going to be on newsstands. It’s going to be in the checkout line at the grocery store. It’s going to be on the news rack at highway gas stations across the Midwest and the south. And it’s going to be viewed very differently in those areas of the country than it will be in the Northeast and West Coast.
Obuma, and his campaign, are panicking and frantic, desperately trying to gain solid footing in this election, and in the process making rookie mistakes. This is going to be so much fun to watch…
There are going to be significant number of people in Middle America over the age of 45 or so who either (a) have no idea what the Rainbow stands for, or (b) still remember it in the context of Jessie Jackson's 1988 attempt for the Democratic POTUS nomination and presume it has something to do with Obama being Black,and (c) aren't immediately going to Google it because they are of an older generation who doesn't think that way, and (d) are going to be incredibly embarrassed when they find out what it does stand for. n nI am just waiting for the Black grandmother, who remembers Selma and the rest of it, to frame this cover and put it up on the wall only to have her intrepid grandson first point out that the halo is actually rainbow colored which one might not notice if one doesn't understand the significance of the rainbow, which he will also be kind enough to explain, and she will be mortified. n nObama will have lost granny, and he ain't getting her back, either. n nRemember that there are still people in this country who think that "gay" means "happy" — which it once did. These are people who still think of organized labor being the AFL/CIO and George Meany with his trademark lit cigar in his mouth, and who believe that the Democratic party is still that of folk like Jack Kennedy (who in reality was to the political right of GWB). They vote for everyone with a "D" after their name because they always have, they have no idea who any of these people are, but they remember George Meany saying "vote for the Democrats" and they do. n nThis cover could well be on the same level as the anti-Goldwater TV ad of the little girl picking the pedals off a daisy — the visceral attention-getter to the cadre who usually ignores politics. The only problem is that was a Kennedy campaign advertisement while this is, at least at first glance, an attempt to *help* Obama. And instead of simply keeping their mouths shut until after the election, the gay community is going to celebrate Obama's endorsement which is going to bring it to the attention of people who otherwise wouldn't have noticed. n n