I’m in the mood for a realigning election, aren’t you? They’re almost as rare as Halley’s Comet, so we should be on the lookout for one in the event it comes by. We haven’t had one since 1932, you know.

This led to an obvious thought. In 2008 The New Yorker has covered the election very closely; there have been innumerable articles touching on Barack Obama, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. There have been covers, blog entries, podcasts, and cartoons.

(And today the magazine’s website is offering a massive amount of coverage, including stuff from James Surowiecki, Hendrik Hertzberg, Lizzie Widdicombe, and a very timely Election Day edition of “Book Bench” dedicated to the act of reading while waiting to vote. Really, they’re flooding the zone.)

Nobody could fairly complain that The New Yorker has stinted on election coverage this year.

So let’s look at the last realigning election! What did The New Yorker do then? Surely not a cover, that wasn’t the way they did things. That’s fine. But a tart, expectant entry in the Talk of the Town? Perhaps a cartoon expressing relief? That seems certain.

Not if you judge by the issues around Election Day, it isn’t. Election Day in 1932 fell on November 8. The New Yorker had issues dated November 5 and 12.

The only sign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor in either of those issues appears to be on a single page dedicated to a satirical newspaper called “The Blotz” and written by Frank Sullivan—so saith the Search Archive.

“The Blotz” is difficult to summarize; it looks pretty funny, actually, but most of the humor is simply lost on us. There’s a box on the top that has “OUR PLATFORM: Deutschland Über Alles” in it; there’s an item making fun of the many Roosevelts all over the country who will presumably be clogging the ballot box for FDR. There’s a little pictorial representation of “Governor Roosevelt” in which he resembles the Cryptkeeper from Tales from the Crypt.

Ah, humor. It reminds me of when I yank out an issue of Punch to peruse, and similarly fail to get any of the jokes.

In any case, it’s safe to say that the 2008 version of TNY outstrips its 1932 counterpart. So much for realignment; times change. Hurrah!