That's right, Ron. One memorable picture is worth 10,000 or 100,000 words in the propaganda game...because a visual image goes straight into the subconscious mind for one thing, and it stays there...and it leaves a lasting overall impression on the emotions. People forget the words. They don't forget the dramatic images.

It only takes a 1 second glance at that picture to lock the image of Barack and Michelle Obama as 2 antisocial terrorists and Black Power "Muslim" freaks in the minds of millions and millions of ordinary people...and there the image remains.

For a majority of ordinary people out there no amount of intelligent verbal explanations of the satirical purpose behind the picture can ever go as deep as that 1 second visual image does. They will remember the image. They will forget the satirical explanations of the picture or not even bother listening to them in the first place. They don't have time or patience for the explanations.

I think the guys at the New Yorker failed to realize the power of visual images over sophisticated thought and analysis. That this would happen is fairly predictable, because the guys at the New Yorker are self-consciously intellectual by habit. They are used to analyzing all the words! Most Americans are not intellectuals by habit, and they are quite suspicious of the people who are. They see those people as "elitists". There is an anti-intellectual streak in popular American culture that goes right back to the rugged cowboy and frontier stereotypes portrayed in thousands of American books and movies...books and movies where the "bad guy" is so often a sophisticated, fancy-talking intellectual of some kind. A high-falutin', pretentious type who dresses really well, maybe has a cane or a mustache, and uses big words. He's just gotta be the "bad guy", right? ;-) Good guys don't use those fancy words, and they dress like jus' plain folks...

It's therefore inimical to your chances of ever being elected to be seen as an intellectual if you are running for office in the USA, and it's one of the things Obama gets attacked for regularly...if he acts or talks like an intellectual, he gets accused of being an elitist...not sometimes. Every time.

This is very unfortunate. A man should not have to deliberately dumb down his act to become electable...but that's exactly what works in American politics. Reagan was an absolute master of the technique, and Bush used it pretty effectively too for a fair while. It still works for those who have not abandoned Bush. It will work for McCain also, because he's a "war hero" who talks tough...just like a John Wayne cowboy character would.

The main thing the Democrats have on their side to counter that is simply that people are very, very fed up with the Republicans after the last 8 years of folly under the Bush administration. Sometime the worm has to turn.