Doonesbury: 'Obama wins!'

WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 (UPI) -- Garry Trudeau, who draws the long-running U.S. comic strip "Doonesbury," has prepared a strip for next week presuming an Obama victory on Election Day.

Trudeau has submitted the strip for next Wednesday's newspaper, The Washington Post said Friday -- a move that the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist said was initially met with "panic and anger" from some newspapers.

Trudeau told the newspaper he called the election because if he didn't he would have "no premise for the week and be forced to write about something else."

"I didn't want to write about something else," he said. "This is history."

His syndicate, Universal Press Syndicate, says a replacement strip will be made available to newspapers who request it.

Trudeau called the decision a matter of "rational risk assessment" based on the word of Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight.com. Silver, known for his mastery at statistics and probability, has concluded that Republican nominee John McCain has a 3.7 percent chance of winning the Nov. 4 election.

The way Trudeau figures it, if Barack Obama loses "it'll be a massive upset, and the goofy misprediction of a comic strip will be pretty much lost in the uproar. I figure I can survive a little egg on my face."

And to be really on the safe side, the syndicate that distributes "Doonesbury" has provided clients with reruns, "just in case."