Shuffling through the editorial cartoon archives

The Review-Journal subscribes to a number of editorial syndicates, which provide us with the best editorial cartooning in the country, offered by a dozen artists scattered from Phoenix to Buffalo to Palm Beach. When the time comes to illustrate a piece for our op-ed page, we have hundreds of recent political cartoons to sort through.

Looking for a cartoon that portrays John McCain or Sarah Palin as clueless or stumble-tongued? Choose from dozens. Even Joe Biden takes an occasional hit.

Looking for a cartoon even mildly critical of Sen. Barack Obama? No luck. Last summer, Pat Oliphant did offer one panel that showed the Illinois senator walking on water — though that seemed more a criticism of his followers' expectations. Not much since then.

And this is a guy who decided to accept his party's nomination not in the convention hall, but outdoors in a football stadium, lit like Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" on a built-to-order stage set that could have held the concluding scene of Cecil B. DeMille's "Samson and Delilah."

The cartoonists found nothing worthy of parody there? If John McCain had tried that, he'd have been shown as the dancing leprechaun on the toadstool from "This is Spinal Tap."

Do you really think associates as colorful as jailed felon Antoin "Tony" Rezko and unrepentant terror bomber William Ayres (in whose living room Sen. Obama kicked off his presidential campaign) and raving "God Damn America" preacher Jeremiah Wright and Obama mentors Communist poet Frank Marshall Davis and Saul "The Red" Alinsky and even collectivist African bureaucrat Barack Hussein Obama Sr. — who favored the seizure of farms owned by a racial minority and saw nothing wrong with a "100 percent tax" — would be off limits if the candidate were some rich white businessman? "Saturday Night Live" sees no possibilities for a parody of "This Is Your Life," with each of these inconvenient characters walking onstage to a fanfare from the band during a nationally televised debate?

The cartoons that moved right after Sen. Obama nailed down the Democratic nomination was particularly revealing. More than one cartoonist offered some version of the ghost of Martin Luther King, Jr. or the big statue at the Lincoln Memorial giving a "thumbs up."

Did they mean Abe Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr. would have agreed with Sen. Obama's prescriptions on tax hikes or nationalizing health care or the banking industry? I don't think so. These cartoons celebrated the fact that a black man had won a major party nomination for president.

That's not the color-blindness that the Rev. King yearned for. That's racism. It presumes something good has been accomplished because we have nominated someone from a given GROUP, regardless of the freshman senator's individual merits.

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