Time Magazine's FDR/Obama Cover: An Eerie Gimmick

This cover bothers me. It’s the November 24, 2008 Time magazine, with the cover line, “The New New Deal: What Barrack Obama can learn from F.D.R.—and what the Democrats need to do.” The cover story, “The New Liberal Order,” is by Peter Beinart.  

Time’s managing editor Richard Stengel says the story suggests that Obama might restore order in the way FDR did, by forging a liberal majority. “Liberalism is about regulating,” he says.

All that sounds great. I am all for order. I respect FDR.  And I respect Obama.  So why does this cover bother me so much?

For those of you not glued to cable news and Internet, the cover uses an original image of FDR, with Obama’s face Photoshopped into FDRs.

I find it eerie and a little disrespectful.  I am comfortable with the connection—most historians credit FDR with helping to pull us out of the Great Depression.  Americans looked to him with hope and supported him by electing him to four terms of office, making him the only president to be elected for more than two terms. In 1951, the 22nd Amendment imposed a two-term limit on the presidency to keep that from happening again.

So the magazine's overt message is solid.  It is the image itself I find troubling. It takes our new president-elect, a very serious man, and makes him look a little like a 1930s playboy. In FDRs time, that cigarette holder—or whatever it is—and hat may have looked dapper and sophisticated. Today, they look silly, and they make the president-elect, who has great promise, look a little less than himself.

Photoshopping is a great tool for cleaning up photos. Should it be used to replace one president's face with another on a major magazine?  What an odd question to even have to ask. The clear answer to me is:  "No."  That's a gimmick.  It's neither good design nor good journalism.  And it certainly is not good photography, if it is photography at all.