Is It A Racist Or Stupid Cartoon?

This editorial cartoon appeared in the pages of Americas great newspaper, the New York Post, this past Wednesday.
When I first saw this cartoon on Wednesday, I did not get it. I had to look, and look. My first thought once I think I got it was that congress is about as smart as a chimp and either or could have written the so-called economic "stimulus" bill.
But, how wrong I was. So wrong.
According to a man that should be in jail, Al Sharpton, it is a "racist" cartoon.
Why, you may ask, did this cartoon raise the ire of the original race huckster?
Because the chimp represents President Obama according to the race huckster.
Really?
I really have thought that it is a stretch, but I did listen to Juan Williams on Fox News Sunday. And this is a transcript of the following panel discussion:

WILLIAMS: I don't see how you can get around it. I mean, it's unbelievable to me. They say in the picture well, it's not necessarily the case that this chimpanzee represents Barack Obama , but then who does he represent?
I guess the idea is, oh, all politicians are a bunch of monkeys playing around with the stimulus package, or Congress writes the bill, not the president. But I think Barack Obama is identified -- he's the personification of the stimulus package in the country.
And to have this image of him as a monkey -- I mean, it appeals to -- it appeals to the most base racial stereotypes that we as Americans have gone through.
So the way it hit me was I wanted to excuse it. I wanted -- in my mind, because I think the New York Post is a fine, funny newspaper, and that cartoonist has every right to make fun of the president or anybody else, but it did strike me as racial.

Unlike Mr. Sharpton, Mr. Williams makes sense. I took another look at the cartoon. But the more I look at it, the more that it is a stupid cartoon.
A good cartoonist would have had something on the chimp, that said "congress" or "congressional Democrats" Usually, the cartoonist would indicate what each group in question represented.
But, by not clearly indicating that the chimp represented congress, the cartoonist left way to much to interpretation. And that means it is a lousy cartoon.
FTR, I have seen worse cartoons in the Post. Usually all on Page Six, the gossip page.
By letting race hucksters like Mr. Sharpton get any traction on this, the cartoon missed the point. And the Post did the right thing in issuing an editorial apology to anyone genuinely offended by the cartoon. But it rightfully took the race huckster crowd to task and rightfully so.
I think that it was a lousy cartoon because I do not think many who looked at it got it. And, there is potential that people could see it as a veiled racial attack.
In the future, for this cartoonist, it is important to make clear in someway what is meant so that there is not this kind of interpretation in the future.