Time’s back-page essay this week is a set of Steve Brodner car cartoons with little paragraphs by Teddy Wayne and Mike Sacks comparing the leading presidential contenders to automobiles. The cheesiest? Hillary’s model is “The Hot Rodham.” This being Time magazine, this “hot” car/contender’s major problem is tilting away from the true North of liberalism: “Although the new, improved version still tends to drift toward the middle of the road, engineers claim they are addressing this alignment problem and should have it fixed well ahead of its nationwide ‘08 debut.” They were rougher on the “Bidenza.”

Five of the cars are Democrats, and just two are Republican. (There is no Mitt-mobile, even though he just announced his candidacy at the Henry Ford Museum.) The “Giulianova” joke a la Louima is New York City police officers “raved about the unfettered power the Giulianova afforded them.” McCain’s model “maintains remarkable popularity thanks to its designers’ willingness to speak candidly about defects in other models by the same maker; they recently said the Rumfedsel ‘will go down as one of the worst lemons in American history.’”