A shtick can be recognized as satire and still be considered "tasteless and offensive." This is clearly the position of the Obama campaign with regard to the New Yorker cover. No, they don't necessarily think millions of flyover Americans are going to see this obviously cartoonish cartoon and believe it 's "true" or that it's any real journalist's straightforward interpretation of what's true. But if they don't complain about it's deliberately provocative "irony," then they'd probably be depicted as complicit in it by many of the same people who are now disingenuously claiming that the Obama people are over-reacting.

Look at those effete smarmy liberals, with their too clever, too cutesy 'humor'. They don't know the difference between an honest laugh and an offensive sophomoric in-joke.

And then would come the painstaking, rigorous analysis of why the Obama people should never have let this "innocent" joke slide, about how, when you're running for the highest office in our land, you simply cannot allow any depiction of yourself of any kind in the same frame with a burning US flag -- no matter how obviously 'non-serious' -- without immeditately registering your indignation; the American people won't stand for that. Had the Obama campaign just shrugged this off the punditocracy would be lambasting them for their tin ear for core values and their cavalier attitude toward basic American sensibilities -- the whole litany of charges regularly trotted out to support the cliché: liberal=antiAmerican.

Seriously, what is the Obama campaign now being accused of here? That they took the joke too much to heart, that they didn't act "cool" enough? For a generation now we've been told that liberals are bad at politics precisely because, among many other imagined sins, they're too unserious, too self-consciously 'hip' and Hollywood in their attitudes, too insensitive to all the picayune fault lines of mainstream PC when it comes to "values" and patriotic iconography (Obama is still, for instance, being dogged with CNN snap polls about whether candidates should wear flag lapel pins: "(a) never; (b) some of the time; or (c) ALL of the time.")

The so-called liberal media has shown for some time now, since the heyday of Spiro Agnew at least, its own excessive sensitivity to charges of snobbery, elitism, unAmericanism, etc. So yes, the New Yorker cover was clearly a joke, and clearly designed to register as such with the magazine's core subscribers and Manhattan media pros. But no, it is not an over-reacting tactical miscue on the part of the Obama campaign to decide that in this case, torn by the deliberately ambiguous irony of the image's rhetorical "intentions," it had to come down clearly in its response on the side of being protective of core nativist sensibilities at the expense of demonstrating to the snarky media world that it can -- nudge nudge, wink wink -- take a bit of too clever insider wittiness with a cool hip shrug.

After all that's what irony, as a rhetorical device, is specifically designed to do -- to make people choose between different or even diametrically opposed reader responses, the overlap between them being the source of all the exquisite frisson of readerly perception that makes people say "ah, irony." You'd think a professional media sophisticate like Jack Shafer might be able to acknowledge that before striking his pose of over-determined non-chalance.