NEW YORK -- The cover of The New Yorker the week after the Nov. 7 midterm elections showed a giant elephant statue being toppled, with people in the lawn way below jubilant and the White House beyond with the U.S. flag atop it at half mast.
Mark Ulriksen, who painted the cover, no doubt had in mind the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad's Fardus Square on April 9, 2003. As in the cover picture, a rope hung from Hussein's neck as a wire looped around it pulled his statue forward. Beyond it there was even an imposing onion-domed building, suggestive of something comparable to the White House.
Ulriksen's picture was clear in its design, but it was ironic as well. The clear part was, of course, Democrats' recapture of both chambers of Congress that they'd lost in 1994, thereby taking at least one branch of government out of the clutches of the Republican Party. This was a relief to those Americans who have lived with the frustration that their government lost its "checks and balances" function after 2000. That year, the Republican Party took the executive branch through a questionable, unseemly intervention of the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court.