IN FAIRNESS TO THESE COMICS...:

May We Mock, Barack? (Maureen Dowd, 7/16/08, NY Times)

When I interviewed Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for Rolling Stone a couple years ago, I wondered what Barack Obama would mean for them.

"It seems like a President Obama would be harder to make fun of than these guys," I said.

"Are you kidding me?" Stewart scoffed.

Then he and Colbert both said at the same time: "His dad was a goat-herder!"

When I noted that Obama, in his memoir, had revealed that he had done some pot, booze and "maybe a little blow," the two comedians began riffing about the dapper senator's familiarity with drug slang.

Colbert: Wow, that's a very street way of putting it. 'A little blow.'

Stewart: A little bit of the white rabbit.

Colbert: 'Yeah, I packed a cocktail straw of cocaine and had a prostitute blow it in my ear, but that is all I did. High-fivin.' '

Flash forward to the kerfuffle -- and Obama's icy reaction -- over this week's New Yorker cover parodying fears about the Obamas.

...does anyone anticipate that he'll turn out to be a coward come crunch time? Why should they have anticipated their own cravenness?

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 16, 2008 2:07 PM