Fair Use -Manny Garcia and the A.P. vs Shepard Fairy

The question raised is:
 Should Artist Shepard Fairy have been able to use the likeness of photographer Manny Garcia's photo of President Barack Obama to create his own piece of work titled "HOPE". Mr. Fairy's lawyers argued that this fell under the copyright laws section entitled "fair use".

Being a photographer myself , my first reaction to the photo vs artist print was to say "Heck yeah , that is not fair, this is obviously too close to   the photographers copyrighted picture. However , after reading the actual Stanford article I must conclude that it falls under the Commentary and Criticism category the laws speaks of a requirement is to transform the work with the extent of enlightenment.
This could be argued successfully with the fact that the artist used the word HOPE on the piece as a way to enlighten the public with this image.