TOW #15 - 2011 Political Cartoon

This political cartoon by seasoned American political critic Jimmy Margulies was published in 2011. Jimmy Margulies is known for his cartoons that poke fun at trends both in the United States government and in the reactions garnered from the American public. His drawings are published, and this one is no exception, in the Hackensack Paper of New Jersey.
In 2011 IBM's Watson, an artificially intelligent natural speech computer capable of parsing abstract prompts and responding in the same vein, competed on the popular trivia show Jeopardy. It won first prize and was rewarded with one million dollars. Despite this impressive technological achievement, the nation was (and still is) facing the sociopolitical issues of social security, medicare, and medicaid.Margulies is attempting to demonstrate what he believes is the frivolity and unimportance of the technological achievement when the nation has yet to conquer the sociopolitical issues. Margulies starkly contrasts the two by depicting Watson struggling to respond to the latter issues despite its former feats.
On either side of Watson are complacent, happy individuals competing against it. If Margulies had wanted their smiles to imply their satisfaction at Watson's inability to think about complex social systems (and therefore lose the trivia game) their faces should have been more excited than relaxed. This cartoon would have had a moral focused more on the technology aspect, saying that humans still have a lot to offer in critical thinking fields. It is more likely however, considered their relaxed faces that Margulies is arguing that the American public is happy and contented with the technology despite more important political issues. Whether or not the figures are effective depends on exactly what their purpose was.
Overall, between the question (as opposed to an expectant answer as is customary on Jeopardy) the distracting understatement of the importance of Watson in technological advancement, and the ambiguous figures that frame the cartoon, the image is ineffective. The rhetorical strategies of juxtaposition and perhaps metaphor are present, but so too are the straw man argument and a lack of clarity.