Barack Obama turned fifty on August 4. I guess the most common reaction to this piece of information is something like “Well.. good for him.” Or that’s what I was thinking, anyway. Still, it made me look up the Obama cartoons on toonpool.com (full list here). While doing so I noticed, that Mr. Obama rose to global fame about the same time that our site went online and has, in a way, accompanied us ever since

The first Obama cartoon was posted on January 9, 2008, not quite two months after toonpool.com was opened to the public. I have to admit that I’m not really sure about this particular cartoon’s meaning. Still, browsing through over 1700 Obama cartoons brings up a few memories and gives some insight into the way in which editorial cartoons and caricatures develop. If you would like to take a look into three years of political cartoons, here’s a rough timeline. [Unfortunately, the links in the titles are not permanent - things will change as soon as new Obama cartoons are added, but everything should be fine for couple of days]

Phase One : Democratic Primaries (~Januar-June 2008) [Wikipedia]

A lot of fierce battles between Obama and Clinton here. I really liked the Monty Python cartoon. Some apparently thought that McCain would profit from this.

Phase Two : Obama VS McCain (~June-October 2008) [Wikipedia]

A lot of cartoons about everyone idolizing Obama here. This was also the time when he traveled to Berlin. And the time Sarah Palin showed up. On a sidenote: I remembered people talking about Obama walking on water.. but John McCain?!

Phase Three: Winning the Elections (November 2008) [Wikipedia]

Boy, were cartoonists enthusiastic about this. By January, a couple of  people began to get tired of it, though.

Phase Four: Obamacare (~August 2009- March 2010) [Wikipedia]

We have cartoons about its unsuspected difficulties, its cost, and – of course – about  “death panels” (in case you forgot about those: more Wikipedia).

Phase Five: The Nobel Peace Prize (October – December 2009) [Wikipedia]

That one was a bit weird.

Phase Six: Nuclear Disarmament (April 2010) [Wikipedia]

There weren’t too many bad things people had to say about New START.

Phase Seven: The BP Spill (April-July 2010) [Wikipedia]

The “walking-on-water” thing was used a couple of times here. By the way.. does anyone know what things are like on the Gulf Coast?

Phase Eight: Midterm Elections (November 2010) [Wikipedia]

People who hadn’t heard about the Tea Party movement definitely did after November 2.

Phase Nine: Osama Bin Laden (May 2011) [Wikipedia]

If we have learned one thing from this, it’s that “Obama” sounds almost like “Osama”.

Phase Ten: The Debt Ceiling (~July-August 2010) [Wikipedia]

It was a wild ride, but we are safe now, right?

Paul Hellmich (Twitter)

title image by Tjeerd Royaards

In this section I try to try to explain cartoons that require very specific knowledge about a certain country’s politics and culture.  If you have any editorial cartoons that you would like me to figure out, just send me an email.

For the third installment I picked a cartoon by Canadian artist Graeme MacKay. It is called “Elephant and Mouse”.

Who are these people?

The elephant represents the United States of America, sole remaining superpower and birthplace of the Ziploc Bag. The image is not related to United Statesian uses of elephants as a symbol for the Republican Party.

The mouse reprents Canada, the United States’ neighbor to the north. Covering an area of 9,984,670 square kilometers Canada is actually  the larger of the two nations. Its population, on the other hand, is only about an ninth of the United States population.

Sir Not-appearing-in-this-cartoon: This is Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919-2000), Canadian Prime Minister between 1968 and 1969 and once again between1980 and 1984. Trudeau was a member of the Liberal Party.

What’s the point?

The cartoon’s iconography refers to a statement made by Mr. Trudeau in 1969 . The Prime Minister told the Washington Press Club :

“Living next to [the United States] is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

This image has become a common-place analogy for US-Canadian relations, which may seem a bit neurotic from an outside position. While Canadians tend to emphasize that they are different from the US, at the same time they are somewhat obsessed about the doings of their neighbor. Much to their dismay, the other Americans are usually quite ignorant about what Homer Simpson once called “America Jr.”.

The cartoon was originally published on November 30, 2010 , just after the first diplomatic cables had been published on WikiLeaks. Back then, the  United States were frantically trying to keep the damage from the publication under control. MacKay parodies the Canadian media’s excitement about Canada being mentioned in the cables. As with most Western countries, the revelations in the cables from Ottawa contained common knowlege rather than the kind of information US diplomats were worrying about.

The 2009 cable quoted in the cartoon – apparently the most offending one -  stated that:

“[Barack Obama's] decision to make Ottawa [his] first foreign destination as President will do much to diminish — temporarily, at least — Canada’s habitual inferiority complex vis-a-vis the U.S. and its chronic but accurate complaint that the U.S. pays far less attention to Canada than Canada does to [them].”

(read a Globe & Mail article on the cables )

I hope this was of any help.

Paul Hellmich with Tim David Kremser