Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist behind Doonesbury, is ready to risk a “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment. The famed cartoonist, a Pulitzer prize winner, has already submitted his strip for Wednesday, November 5th. According to the AP, it assumes that Barack Obama will win the presidency.
The strip shows a group of soldiers in Iraq gathered around a TV, waiting for news of the election. From the TV they hear, "And it's official. Barack Obama has won ... Making him the first African-American president in history!"
"Son of a gun! What a great, great day! We did it!" a soldier says.
A number of editors were uncomfortable and called the Universal Press Syndicate to complain or ask for replacements. The syndicate had Trudeau pick out several substitute strips they could send to papers that “don’t want to go out on a limb.”
For his part, Trudeau says he isn’t terribly concerned about being embarrassed by a McCain victory. He told the LA Times that “polling data gives McCain a 3.7% chance of victory. There's a greater risk that their presses will break down on election day.” Plus, he did the same thing in 1984, accurately calling the election for Ronald Reagan.
Tucker Bounds, a McCain spokesman, was unamused. He said the McCain campaign “hope[s] the strip proves to be as predictive as it is consistently lame.”
Well, there's always “Family Circus.”
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