“Just the same way I resented having a bunch of really smart neocons tell us how great the war in Iraq was going to be, Obama’s lining up a bunch of technocrats telling us how they’re going to bring heaven on earth,” said Wilkinson, a 1992 Pulitzer Prize winner. “If he does everything he says he’s going to do and the economy makes an immediate U-turn and peace breaks out in the Middle East, I would say we’re going to be in trouble. But absent that, I think we’ll be OK.”

During the presidential campaign, cartoonists frequently homed in on Obama’s measured temperament, with more critical strips caricaturing him as cold and aloof. More often than not, though, drawings were complimentary. One showed him mending a Constitution shredded by Bush, and another depicted him as a symbol of 1960s civil rights struggles. Cartoons regularly portrayed Obama as rail-thin with big ears or playing basketball (one of his passions) or placed him in a pantheon with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln.