Worryingly Overconfident

Comic creator Garry Trudeau delivered a series of strips for next week's papers showing his characters reacting to an Obama victory. But he offered no such option in the event of a comeback by John McCain, who's trailing Obama in the polls.

Trudeau's syndicator is offering papers a series of rerun strips from August. But the Obama story line is forcing some editors to question whether "Doonesbury" could put them in a spot -- albeit in the funny pages -- similar to 1948, when the Chicago Daily Tribune infamously declared in huge, front-page type that Republican Thomas Dewey had beaten Democrat Harry Truman for the presidency.

The strip shows three soldiers watching TV and reacting to this announcement: "

And it's official -- Barack Obama has won ... Making him the first
African-American president in history!"

"Hoo-Ah!" one of the soldiers says.

"Son of a gun! What a great, great day! We did it!" another soldier says.

"He's half-white, you know," says a white soldier.

"You must be so proud," responds a soldier, who isn't white.