WASHINGTON — Add one more item to the long list of disagreements between Democrats and Republicans: Whether it was appropriate for The New Yorker magazine to publish a cover satirizing Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his wife as fist-bumping radicals.
Among those who had seen it, nearly two of three Democrats said it wasn’t right for the liberal-leaning publication to use the cartoon for its July 21 cover, roughly the same number of Republicans who said it was OK, according to a poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
Seven in 10 Democrats said the cover was offensive and just over half called it racist — sentiments with which majorities of Republicans disagreed. Only about a fifth of Democrats thought it was clever or funny, as did larger minorities from the GOP.
For each question, independents’ views were more similar to Republicans than Democrats.
Overall, about half the public reported seeing the cover.
Obama, whose campaign has called the drawing “tasteless and offensive,” is depicted wearing a turban and other traditional Muslim clothes. His wife, Michelle, sports an Angela Davis-like Afro, wears combat fatigue pants and carries an assault rifle. The American flag burns in a fire place, above which hangs a portrait of Osama bin Laden.
The survey was conducted from July 18-21 and involved telephone interviews with 1,000 adults. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
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