The creator of Doonesbury and “Alpha House” talks with Jim Rutenberg about his change of heart on Reagan and what’s inside Obama’s brain.
The second season of your show, “Alpha House,” was just released on Amazon, and it again focuses on a group of Republicans. Why Republicans? The Republican narrative is just more interesting: mainstream conservatives who were elected in the pre-Ted Cruz era, finding themselves in unfamiliar territory, taking fire from their right. That just seemed juicy to me.
Has the rise of the Tea Party softened your views of your old “Doonesbury” target Ronald Reagan? I guess so. There’s one scene this season in which a Reagan impersonator visits a Republican retreat, and we have him say things that Reagan actually said, and the room starts booing him. Within 10 minutes dinner rolls are flying, because he’s cherry-picking these Reagan quotes that were dangerously reasonable.
“Doonesbury” was famous in the ’80s for the “Reagan’s Brain” strips, in which a reporter, Roland, files dispatches from within the president’s damaged brain. Would you write them differently today? I’m perhaps inordinately proud of them in my memory. The first series was thrown out of a lot of papers, because it was thought to be too strongly partisan just before an election. And who should ride to my rescue but The Wall Street Journal! Which has had nothing nice to say about me ever since, but at the time, it defended the strips.
What do you think is in Obama’s brain? Oh, layers of complexity that I don’t think Roland could possibly penetrate. It wouldn’t occur to me to send one of my characters on a trek through it.
Neither “Alpha House” nor “Doonesbury” dwells much on Obama. He doesn’t seem to generate much comedic fodder. Why is that? I don’t know. The editorial cartoonists have been tied up in knots. They have no idea what to do with him. Maybe it’s a kind of blandness. There’s a seriousness about the administration; they don’t misspeak very often. There may be a general incoherence to the foreign policy, but that’s a very hard thing to wrap your arms around. Having said that, he doesn’t seem to be suffering from a shortage of critics.
Have you been personally disappointed in the administration? Yes, but I’m just as frustrated with all the people who have put roadblocks in his way.
How many times do you think “Doonesbury” was suspended? Do you keep a tally? I have never done a tally. In 1985, the strip’s various cancellations generated 10 wire-service stories in one year. This is national news, 10 times.
Do you think a strip could have that kind of impact today? No. Comics have become marginalized. Newspapers have less potency than they once did.
But do you think making big statements about politics is harder to do on TV than in a comic strip? The show is really not about statements. I mean, yes, if you can raise an issue and move people to thought and judgment about it, that’s a benefit. But we’re trying to tell stories; we’re trying to entertain.
Which president has been your most vocal opponent? The first President Bush was so abundant in his condemnations of the strip that he began to be asked about it, and then the more he was asked, the more he would talk. Editorial writers started to wonder why he was so disturbed by a comic strip.
You had questioned his manhood, right? I never questioned it. I said he had put it in a blind trust while he was vice president.
You went to Yale with George W. Bush. When I was a sophomore and W. was a senior, I illustrated an article for the newspaper about hazing at Bush’s fraternity — D.K.E. had been branding initiates with a red-hot iron. It became a national story. The Times interviewed Bush. And Bush described the branding as no worse than a cigarette burn. His first interview in the national media was in defense of torture.
Did you know him personally? We were on the social committee, and our main responsibilities were to order kegs of beer and select bands.
An earlier version of this interview referred incorrectly to a New York Times article about hazing at George W. Bush’s fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon. The article was reported and written by Steven R. Weisman, then a senior at Yale and a campus correspondent for the paper. The Times did not send a staff reporter to New Haven to cover the story and interview Mr. Bush. (Mr. Weisman went on to work for The Times for 40 years.) And another answer misstated the year that the strip’s various cancellations generated 10 wire-service stories. It was 1985, not 1983.