Remnick, ironically, has been one of the best editors The New Yorker has had in its modern history. He revived the magazine after a long period of drift and mediocrity. To his great and lasting credit, he had the unfashionable nerve and backbone to provide a platform for Seymour Hersh's fearless investigative reporting on Bush administration policies toward Iraq and Iran when none of the larger, infinitely wealthier and more powerful print and broadcast outlets in the United States had the nerve to touch those stories. But he may find he will be forced to resign over a matter of bad taste -- though a very important one.

The notorious cover of The New Yorker in question is, indeed, simply awful. It isn't funny; it is done in the style of unselfconsciously racist and vile political cartoons from the 19th century. It is offensive to any self-respecting African-American and to any self-respecting American Muslim.

The Obama campaign rightly and understandably condemned the cartoon as "tasteless and offensive." Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republicans' putative presidential nominee, lost no time in condemning it as well.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations warned, "These inflammatory images and spurious associations will only serve to reinforce the racism and anti-Muslim stereotypes that the magazine says it is out to challenge."

The storm over the cartoon reopens the debate on how the U.S. national media cover and comment upon presidential campaigns. It reopens the old debate about what is satire and what isn't. And about what is legitimate comment and what isn't.

Remnick told Jake Tapper in an ABC News interview published Monday, "The intent of the cover is to satirize the vicious and racist attacks and rumors and misconceptions about the Obamas that have been floating around in the blogosphere and are reflected in public opinion polls.

"What we set out to do was to throw all these images together, which are all over the top, and to shine a kind of harsh light on them, to satirize them. That's part of what we do," he said.

Tapper, however, suggested in his own blog that the cartoon cover reflected an upper-class New York liberal elitist insensitivity and that it could fan the flames of anti-Muslim sentiment and of right-wing fear and suspicions that Obama was, in fact, a secret Muslim.

"The sophisticates at The New Yorker have come up with a cover that is sure to get the magazine a lot of attention. ... No Upper East Side liberal -- no matter how superior they feel their intellect is -- should assume that just because they're mocking such ridiculousness, the illustration won't feed into the same beast in e-mails and other media. It's a recruitment poster for the right-wing. ... I would assume over at the Conde Nast building, they think it's droll," Tapper wrote.

Remnick, significantly, told Tapper in the ABC interview he was outraged, not over the substance of Tapper's criticism, which was shrewd and probably prescient, but by the fact that Tapper, who also enjoyed an elite background like Remnick himself, had dared to make it at all.

"Playing the elitism card, when you too are from New York and went to Dartmouth, I mean, that really doesn't wash," Remnick said. "I think it's an easy card to play. Especially with The New Yorker, and, you know, I shouldn't let you get away with it. You're not exactly coming from a poor background or from an underfunded media outlet, and I don't think that's fair. I think it's just not the level of thought and discourse that normally I see on your blog, and lot of other ones. ... I get the back and forth, I can live with that, but I thought that was kind of a cheap shot."

But those comments of Remnick reveal a double standard and myopia on his own part: Affecting to criticize the campaign of accusation and innuendo against Obama, he inadvertently has given it enormous legitimacy by approving a high-profile "shock 'em" cover that can only serve to pour gasoline on the flames. Extreme right-wing and even racist critics of Obama and his wife no doubt will eagerly seize on the offensive New Yorker cover and distribute it across the Internet to multiple millions, not as irony but as claimed fact.

The cartoon even showed the U.S. flag burning in the grate behind Obama and his wife as they were dolled up in radical chic costumes and hairstyles that traditionally have had extreme anti-American cultural connotations going back now more than 40 years.

As a colleague of mine at United Press International privately commented, "When Remnick is saying that the U.S. flag burning in the grate should make it clear that this is satire, he's in pretty desperate straits."

Remnick and his staff became blind to the power and sheer offensiveness of the symbol they were creating. They were so obsessed with the power of the word inside their widely respected magazine that they took it for granted readers would recognize their terrible cover was not meant to be taken literally and that it was actually meant to be sympathetic to Obama.

They forgot the power of the image, and the old truer-than-ever journalistic cliche that one picture is more powerful than a thousand words. In this case, it blotted out entirely the well-meaning, carefully reasoned, intellectual argument of several thousand words within the magazine.

The magazine cover boomeranged: It was meant to ridicule a supposedly stupid, ugly, know-nothing right; instead, it looks likely to energize the very forces on the extreme right it sought to pillory. And it cast Remnick and his staff in the very image they most loathe -- as arrogant, out of touch and, worst of all, incompetent liberals, inadvertently stabbing their own political hero and his wife in the back in the most offensive way.