The fallout from the "satirical" New Yorker magazine cover featuring Barack and Michelle Obama continues, and in today's LA Times Andrew Malcolm argues the Obama campaign could've handled all of this much better.

He writes:

Ignoring the magazine would have been ideal. But if that's not possible, what if Burton [Obama's communications director] had made himself available -- that's not hard to do with reporters circling like hawks -- waited for the inevitable New Yorker question and said something like, "C'mon, guys. It's a magazine cover, for Pete's sake. A cartoon. They think it's satire. It's a free country. It's sure not funny. We think there are far more important issues to put on the cover of a magazine, like the looming mortgage crisis that the Bush administration and its McCain cronies have ignored so long."

That dismissal and redirection would have made it hard for the McCain folks to point it out because they'd also be calling attention to their Bush connections.

While it's important to "get ahead of the story," hence the Obama campaign calling the magazine cover "tasteless and offensive" on the day it came out, we agree with Malcom that calling it out in that manner, on a slow news Sunday no less, only boosted it's profile.

Meanwhile, FishbowlNY polled readers, 55% of whom found it more offensive than not.