After 30 years at the drawing board, Jim Borgman struck some startling new challenges in this year's American presidential election campaign...

When my grandmother was a little girl growing up in a tiny, dirt-poor town in central Missouri, she had never seen or tasted food that wasn’t grown on local farms. One day a train derailed as it passed through town and spilled a load of bananas. The town kids all swooped in and filled their bellies with the exotic fruit until they ached. By the time I knew her, my grandmother could hardly look at a banana without turning green, but she always remembered with a sort of drunken joy the thrill of the banana windfall.

Such has been this season’s presidential campaign for American editorial cartoonists. The wondrous gods of irony and comedy have buried us in bananas, and every day we have been stuffing our bellies.

I’ve drawn my way through eight presidential elections as cartoonist for the Cincinnati Enquirer but I can’t remember one where the field, the eventual nominees, and certainly the outcome were as wide open as this one. Politicians seemed to surface from every corner of the map to throw themselves headlong at the primary system, with little regard for physical injury or conventional measures of worthiness. Odd new faces were suddenly on the national scene, and I burned through sketchbooks in front of the television learning all the new caricaturable features. Huckabee? Fred Thompson? Ron Paul? Who were these guys and where had they been wasting these faces?

And the weirdest thing happened. The country got caught up in it. Every time you turned on the TV, there was another straw poll or town hall meeting, some backroad caucus or YouTube debate with a new frontrunner. I’d pedal my exercise bike each morning and listen to the pundits fulminate about the newest overnight polls and gaffes, all of us gasping for air. Sure, I was used to presidential campaigns furnishing colourful material for cartoons, but this time it seemed the heavens had opened and the levees were breaking. We were neck-deep in bananas.

The great drama, of course, was whether the meteoric upstart Barack Obama, who dared to challenge the Clinton machine, would be crushed under its wheels (especially with Bill driving). On policy, Hillary and Barack were virtually identical, so the race quickly became a cultural grudge match asking, among other things, are blacks or women more deserving of the first non-white-guy slot in presidential campaign history? Could the country cope for four or eight more years with the exhausting and consuming trailer-park drama that is the Clintons? And are we prepared, finally, to lay down the profoundly painful stereotypes we have carried all these years and take a giant step toward sanity and healing and elect a president who grew up in Hawaii?

Of course, cartoonists were asking less lofty questions as well: Would Rudy Giuliani take a phone call from his wife during the inauguration ceremony? Does Obama really Facebook my teenagers? How could hard-working people be losing their houses when John McCain couldn’t even count his? And is Tina Fey imitating Sarah Palin or vice versa?

The truth is, this campaign challenged me in a way I hadn’t yet been challenged in 30 years at the drawing board. Without warning and to my utter astonishment, I found myself liking, admiring and pulling for a candidate – Barack Obama – and found myself hard pressed to ridicule him gratuitously. This had never been a problem before and I began taking my daily temperature. His speech on Race in America was one of the most reflective and penetrating speeches I had ever heard from a politician, and I challenged myself to go where no cartoonist ever goes, on threat of losing one’s cartooning licence – I drew an admiring cartoon. More recent cartoons have explored minor foibles and nuances, but I remain captivated, so help me. There, I said it.

Maybe that’s the signal God gives cartoonists when it is time to move on. As destiny would have it, my newspaper, financially foundering like most, offered voluntary redundancy to its employees and I took it. I drew my last editorial cartoon on September 26 and am watching the end of this campaign from the sidelines as I devote myself to my comic strip Zits. For the first time in my adult life I am free to put a bumper sticker on my car and a political sign in my yard.

Somehow it all seems right. If Barack Obama and Joe Biden should win, I might lack the healthy scepticism an editorial cartoonist needs to keep elected officials honest. And if John McCain and Sarah Palin win, I fear their ability to screw things up on an almost biblical scale might outstrip my ability to exaggerate it.

In any case, we’re done with Bush, and not a moment too soon. Enough bananas!

Jim Borgman drew editorial cartoons for the Cincinnati Enquirer for 32 years