Comic calls it: Obama "official" winner

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Some newspaper editors are pondering how to deal with a "Doonesbury" comic strip to be published the day after the election that assumes Barack Obama will win the presidency.

Comic creator Garry Trudeau delivered a series of strips for next week's papers showing his characters reacting to an Obama victory. He offered no such option for McCain, who trails Obama in the polls.

Trudeau's syndicator is offering papers a series of rerun strips from August. But the Obama story line is forcing some editors to question whether "Doonesbury" could put them in a spot — albeit in the funny pages — similar to 1948, when the Chicago Daily Tribune infamously, and erroneously, declared in huge, front-page type that Republican Thomas Dewey had beaten Democrat Harry Truman for the presidency.

"Doonesbury" appears in nearly 1,400 daily and Sunday newspapers, including The Seattle Times, in the United States and overseas.

The Doonesbury strip shows three soldiers watching TV and reacting to this announcement: "And it's official — Barack Obama has won ... Making him the first African-American president in history!"

"Hoo-Ah!" one of the soldiers says.

"Son of a gun! What a great, great day! We did it!" another soldier says.

"He's half-white, you know," a white soldier says.

"You must be so proud," responds a soldier, who isn't white.

The rest of the week's strips allude to an Obama victory.

Tim Bannon, editor of the Chicago Tribune's Live! section, where the paper's comics usually run, said the strip won't appear in the comics section because of deadlines but might end up on another page.

"If McCain wins, we would never run it," he said. "If Obama were to win, we would try to see if we can get it in somehow in some other place."

The Seattle Times plans to run the strip as is.

Kathie Kerr, a spokeswoman for Universal Press Syndicate, said about a dozen calls have come in from newspaper editors.

Trudeau, who lives in New York, said he might have provided papers with a McCain option if the election were a toss-up.

But, he said, at the time he drew the strip, poll analysts were giving McCain less than a 4 percent chance of winning.

"From a risk-assessment viewpoint, I felt comfortable with the odds," Trudeau said in an e-mail. "The way I see it, if Obama wins, I'm in the flow and commenting on an extraordinary phenomenon.

"If he loses, there'll be such a national uproar that a blown call in a comic strip won't be much noticed. Besides, I'll be the one with the egg on my face, not the editors."