Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" is predicting a victory for Barack Obama, and newspaper editors around the country are debating whether to publish the comic no matter the results of the election.
Wednesday's strip is set in Iraq and features military characters huddled around a television that proclaims "And it's official -- Barack Obama has won. . . ."
In an e-mail to The Times, Trudeau said newspapers should run the strip because ". . . polling data gives McCain a 3.7% chance of victory. There's a greater risk that their presses will break down on election day. So I've been encouraging editors to choose hope over fear. And reminding them that if I'm wrong, it'll be my face that'll be covered with egg, not theirs."
Trudeau can always borrow a few eggs from James Carville since he has experience in cracking it over his face when the Democrats lost ground in the 2002 Congressional elections.
Trudeau said he's not worried about the comic if his prediction is wrong. "I'd be a lot more worried about the country than the strip. One reporter has already suggested I just carry on with an alternative universe in which Obama wins. It's not a crazy idea . . . "
From the John McCain camp, spokesman Tucker Bounds said: "We hope the strip proves to be as predictive as it is consistently lame."
Editors first saw the comic on Wednesday. "I thought it was funny," said Michael Weinstein, features editor for the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. "But it's an accuracy issue. We won't know the outcome of the election until Wednesday.
But...but political "expert" Trudeau is claiming that an Obama victory is absolutely certain.
At the Chicago Tribune, "we are reserving the option of running the strip on Wednesday, but we of course would not typeset until we confirmed the result of the election," said Tim Bannon, one of the paper's feature editors.
The Chicago Tribune should be concerned since they are the ones who ran the "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline in 1948.
John Robinson, editor of the News and Record in Greensboro, N.C., wrote in his editor's blog: "I'm thinking that if McCain wins, the embarrassment is Trudeau's, not ours. [Is] there anyone who doesn't think he's liberal? Besides, if McCain does win, just imagine how much fun it will be to watch how Trudeau handles the turnabout."
And how much fun it would be if a victorious John McCain held up that Doonesbury strip the way Harry Truman held up that Chicago Tribune headline in 1948.
