Referencing a WordPress blog post that I found today, here are three of the better political cartoons about Obama’s election posted on that site, or at least the better ones in my opinion.

Obama crosses the Delaware

Obviously, this cartoon is based on this famous image. Note: McCain floating on a George W. Bush inner tube, the black woman (replaced by a white woman from the original painting) and an erudite-looking white man rowing, the Capitol, the melted icebergs, Sarah Palin nearly out of the picture and Obama looking regal and dressed as a revolutionary. Appropriately, the river crossing and subsequent battles culminated in a new day of freedom for America.

The Dream materialized

This was the more subtle of the Martin Luther King Jr.-based cartoons from the post. Here, we see MLK’s famous Dream materialize. True, Obama is only half white, but he is also half black and carries within him a burden that has been carried by oppressed people for decades and centuries, as evidenced by his numerous references to King himself. Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia, if it had been framed in the context of the racial strife, in a different era, in the context of segregation and a not-so-patient hope for a better today, would have went down as, arguably, the landmark speech in American history. It will still critically important and will be, and should be, studied in its strength in structure and rhetoric.

The Lincoln bump

Not since Abraham Lincoln has a American president (or president-elect) meant so much for the centuries-long battle for equal rights in this country. It’s unfortunate that it was only after the Black Codes, lynchings, segregation, the back of the bus and other atrocities that we can finally move forward in a real, tangible way. Sure, we have slowly moved forward as a nation and would have continued, with or without Obama. The Civil Rights movement spurred it on, time and the eventual shift in social conscious did the rest. But here, as Obama makes the leap of which many black folks have only dreamed, Lincoln, not the current president, passes the torch.