Slideshow: cartoons by Peter Brookes

It’s déjà-vu all over again. Pre1997 Blair déjà-vu. Not just because Tony Blair and Barack Obama share sticky-out ears and a rictus grin but because they have compromised me as a cartoonist.

I desperately wanted them to win their elections, the alternatives (John Major then, John McCain now) too depressing for words. When drawing Mr Blair and Mr Obama I found I was pulling my punches because I preferred to attack their opponents. They’d look good by comparison – and it doesn’t do to make any politician look good.

This is the cartoonist’s dilemma. You need the politicians you despise, and the more you hate them the better it is, albeit not necessarily for the rest of the world. A McCain/Palin presidency would have been a breeze. What a target, particularly her. She would have provided me with more ammunition than she could ever let loose at a moose.

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BACKGROUND

• Bush - 'We should all be proud of Obama'

• The challenge that greets Obama

• Full video and text: Obama's victory speech

• Voters honour Martin Luther King's dream

Multimedia

• Bonjour 'Barack'

Everything you love to loathe: Christian fundamentalist, gun-tot-ing, warmongering, squeaky-voiced. And a gift to draw, with that teenage beehive hair, the librarian specs, eyes with a hint of a squint and that beauty queen lipsticked mouth. Next to her Mr McCain appeared to be the junior partner, dazzled by her glitzy aura, eyes blinking while she was winking. The US politician John Nance Garner remarked that the vice-presidency “isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss”, and Sarah Palin made her bid for that office by pouring it all over Mr Obama’s head.

That’s how I’ve tended to depict Mr Obama, defining him by what others visit upon him: the ferocious attacks of the Clintons in the primaries, where race was a barely contained issue, and the withering condescension of Mr McCain and his attack pit-bull snarling over the tenuous links to a terrorist.

But hey, Mr Obama, you’re no victim now. You’re a winner and ultimate power is yours. Now you’re a work in progress. And when you fail to curb US foreign policy excess in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and, God help us, Iran because the sacrifice in spent American lives has made withdrawal from the wider Middle East politically impossible, and when you further the policy of meddling on Russia’s borders and continue the vainglorious attempt to impose US-style democracy on the rest of the world through the nebulously named War on Terror . . . well, the gloves are off, Mr Obama, and I’ll be drawing you differently.

The gleaming grin will become tinged with menace, the eyes not smiling but malevolent, that lissome frame serpentine rather than slender. From hero to zero. They always let you down.

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