Drawing Bush, Kerry -- Oct. 3, 2004
-- A weekly feature on This Week.
Award-winning political caricaturist Steve Brodner has been satirizing major figures in American politics for nearly 30 years. In this week's "Voices/Images," Brodner describes how he captures presidential character with a cartoon. …
"To those of us who draw caricatures, political faces are very revealing because we look very intensely at them. Bush, Clinton, Papa Bush, Reagan — they were all great canvases on which you can tell a story.
"George Bush's face is kind diamond shaped. All the action is basically centered in the middle, and to me, as a caricaturist, I try to emphasize that aspect of his face that's pinched as if a hand has reached in and squeezed together the features, almost as if they were made of clay.
"Bush's face is more of an ode to simpleness. His simple declarative sentences are consonant with looking at the world in a very simple way to me. So it's easy to draw his face in a very simple sweep of the hand.
"Kerry's face is much more shop-worn. You can see all this detail. There are pits and slopes and highs and lows, and you see Kerry under different lighting situations. Sometimes the eyes completely disappear they're so deep set. To me they look like elephant eyes.
"The nose does kind of like a swooping swan dive and the chin is vast — it drags down. I look at that as his expression of his years. It's a great big footprint, Kerry's face.
"To those of us who draw caricatures, these features are not just judgment-free for us. We look to them as keys into an explanation of what they do as presidents."
Saturday Night Live:
Jim Lehrer impersonator: "Each candidate will now make a brief closing statement. Senator Kerry?"
Sen. Kerry impersonator: "You know, this president likes to talk about how I called the war in Iraq 'the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time;' that a few days later, how I said that anyone who doesn't think the world is a safer place without Saddam Hussein is not fit to be Commander-in-Chief. But what he doesn't tell you is that when I denounced the war in Iraq, I was speaking to an anti-war group, and when I endorsed the war, I was addressing a pro-war delegation from the U.G.A. The fact of the matter is, I have consistently supported the war in front of pro-war audiences and condemned it in front of groups that oppose it. That is not flip-flopping; that is pandering. And America deserves a president who knows the difference. Thank you."
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