Jon Stewart, Mocking Both Sides

Feb 1, 2010 — Washington Post

Howard Kurtz

Days before the 2008 election, Jon Stewart jokingly asked Barack Obama whether his "white half" would have trouble making a decision in the voting booth.

"Yeah," the candidate said, "I've been going through therapy to make sure that I vote properly."

Last week, though, the president was the punch line. After showing video of Obama speaking to schoolkids, the "Daily Show" host said in amazement: "You set up a presidential podium and a teleprompter in a sixth-grade classroom? . . . I'm not a political adviser, campaign strategist, et cetera, but that's not a great photo op in a middle school classroom."

It was inevitable that Obama would become a late-night target, at least when Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien and Dave Letterman have taken time out from sliming each other. But Stewart, who makes no secret of leaning left, is a pop-culture bellwether. And while the White House notes that Obama used the prompter to address journalists, not the students, the details matter little in comedy.

Stewart's barbs are generating partisan buzz. In a tweet, Americablog's John Aravosis invoked Martha Coakley's Massachusetts loss in trashing the prompter joke: "So is this the new post-coakley Jon Stewart, picking on Dems for insignificant BS to burnish his indie credentials. Third time in 7 days." The conservative Fox Nation site, by contrast, ran the video under the gleeful header "Jon Stewart Mocks Obama's Teleprompter Dependence."

"He's clearly become an important cultural arbiter," says Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. "He's pulled off the trick of being taken seriously when he wants to be and taken frivolously when he wants to be."

Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor and an occasional guest, sees a glimmer of hope. "Jon has always been a crypto-neocon," he e-mails. "Could he be coming out of the closet? . . . A neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality."

Stewart relentlessly ridiculed George W. Bush for eight years, painting the Iraq war as a giant "Mess O' Potamia." He went easier on John Kerry and Obama and, for a time, had trouble attracting Republican guests. That's one reason he and Stephen Colbert became cult heroes for many younger, liberal fans. During the 2008 Democratic convention, Stewart cracked to reporters that comics were giving Obama a pass because of "liberal bias and not wanting to be racist."

But the Comedy Central star has always maintained that his primary job is getting laughs. And ideology aside, it was hard early on for comedians to get a fix on an eloquent new president with no outsize mannerisms. Even Fred Armisen's "Saturday Night Live" impression was pretty lame.

Now, of course, Obama is in rough political waters, which always makes for better material. In recent weeks, Stewart has accused the president of hypocrisy for breaking his pledge to televise legislative negotiations on C-SPAN: "This looks and sounds pretty bad for Obama." His "senior black correspondent," Larry Wilmore, solemnly informed the host that "Negroes aren't magic. . . . He's just suffering from the hard bigotry of high expectations." On another night, Stewart chided Obama for his cerebral style, saying: "You thought you could win us over with rational policy decisions and an even temperament?"

None of these jokes are particularly cutting, but what's telling is that they're being told at all. During the campaign, Lichter says, comedians made far more jokes about George W. Bush and John McCain than about Obama.

As a faux newsman who regularly skewers the media, Stewart is an icon to many journalists, especially those in television who sometimes copy his quick-cut editing techniques. As NBC anchor Brian Williams, a regular guest, told National Public Radio: "A lot of the work that Jon and his staff do is serious. They hold people to account, for errors and sloppiness."

But here, too, Stewart has been strafing all sides. It was no surprise last month when he made fun of Fox News hosts for supposedly celebrating Scott Brown's Senate victory, saying that reflected the network's "mission statement." But he also took on MSNBC's Keith Olbermann for calling Brown "an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, tea-bagging supporter of violence against women." Olbermann once "toiled in the fields of the factual," Stewart said during a clownish impression, but "now you're just kind of calling people names."

The next night, Olbermann played the bit and addressed Stewart: "You're right. I have been a little over the top lately. Point taken. Sorry." Last week Stewart zinged CNN's "best political team" for displaying brief Twitter comments to evaluate Obama's State of the Union address, and Chris Matthews for saying that while watching the speech he forgot the president was black.

The left's honeymoon with Obama ended long ago. Liberal commentators, including Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz, have taken shots at him for being too cautious or compromising on various issues. But there is something about a comic caricature that is indelible.

Obama, for his part, understands the importance of the late-night audience. He bantered on air with Leno and Letterman last year, and weeks ago chatted with Stewart backstage at the Kennedy Center Honors, while the comedian's wife, Tracey, teared up in the presidential presence.

We've all seen Jon Stewart fire his comic bazooka, against Tucker Carlson on "Crossfire" and Jim Cramer over CNBC's financial coverage. With Obama, he's merely using a popgun. But given Stewart's platform, even that has quite an echo.

Pre-buttal

When Sen. John Cornyn put out a statement calling Obama's address to Congress flawed but "well-delivered," Politico blogger Ben Smith called out the Texas Republican on the fact that the release went out before the speech. Cornyn says he was "a little offended by the lack of journalistic ethics," since he was making life easier for reporters -- but it was, after all, a minor deception. Smith responds that "you can't put something off the record or under embargo without a reporter's consent." Maybe next time, lawmakers will wait until the person they're castigating has actually spoken.

Triple bogey

Once the Tiger Woods mistress count hit double digits, his marriage was toast, at least according to a spate of media reports.

There was People in December, quoting a "source close to Elin Nordegren," the golfer's wife, as saying "she plans to leave Tiger." Another source told the magazine, "She's made up her mind. There's nothing to think about: he's never going to change."

ABC News.com also got in the game, quoting a source close to Nordegren as saying "divorce is 100 percent on." New York's Daily News said Nordegren "reportedly has the dean of Tinseltown's divorce lawyers on her side as she and the golfing great head for Splitsville." These and similar reports were amplified by Web sites around the country.

Except, um, it didn't happen. Now People reports that "Elin Nordegren is hoping to save her marriage to Tiger Woods because she doesn't want to raise their two children without a father. 'Elin wants a solid family life,' a Florida source tells People."

So is this report any more accurate than the first round of divorce speculation? Who knows? One thing's for sure: No one seems to draw even a one-stroke penalty for celebrity stories that turn out to be wrong.

Crunching the numbers

How exciting: It's budget time!

"President Obama will unveil a record $3.8 trillion budget for 2011 on Monday that would boost war spending, trim domestic spending and rely on $1.3 trillion in new borrowing," says USA Today.

"The budget would be the third in a row with a deficit of more than $1 trillion. The red ink would be cut nearly in half by 2014, mostly by allowing tax cuts on families making more than $250,000 to expire in 2011."

The Washington Times says "the White House says the government will run huge deficits for the foreseeable future, including a record $1.55 trillion deficit in 2010, although President Obama will try to reduce that figure to a still staggering $1.2 trillion deficit in the budget he submits to Congress Monday."

That's going to erase the image of a spending-freeze president -- if Congress actually goes along with the freeze, which is questionable.

Losing an ally

For President Obama, Paul Krugman seems to be slipping away:

"After Massachusetts, Democrats were looking for leadership; they didn't get it. Ten days later, nobody is sure what Obama intends to do, and his aides are giving conflicting readings. It's as if Obama checked out.

"Look, Obama is a terrific speaker and a very smart guy. He really showed up the Republicans in the now-famous give-and-take. But we knew that. What's now in question isn't his ability to talk, it's his ability to lead."

For the president in 2010, it's going to come down to results. Otherwise he'll be depicted as a great orator and not much more.

Arianna vs. Roger

On ABC's "This Week," Arianna Huffington challenged Roger Ailes over the language employed by Glenn Beck, saying his words are designed to "incite." The Fox News chairman said there shouldn't be a "word police." Huffington came back to accuse Beck of a "paranoid style." Ailes said such a style seemed to be in fashion at the HuffPost, which has compared him to J. Edgar Hoover and worse.

No more 'don't ask'?

It kind of got lost amid all the other State of the Union proposals, but Obama said on national television that he would repeal "don't ask, don't tell." The fact that there wasn't a media uproar was telling, in my view; with gay marriage in a half-dozen states, the climate is very different than at the time of the Clinton compromise. But Mother Jones's Kevin Drum says a battle is brewing:

"Make no mistake: even after 15 years to get used to the idea, even with public opinion strongly in favor, even with the military itself slowly getting accustomed to the inevitable, this is going to be a pitched battle. And as with healthcare reform, although Obama's support will be important, it won't be decisive. What's really going to matter is whether 218 representatives and 51 senators are willing to support it. (That's assuming it gets tacked onto the defense appropriation bill, which is passed under reconciliation rules.)

"Right now this seems like a very winnable fight, but that's because the pushback hasn't really started yet. But once Fox gets going, and op-eds get written, and the locker room tittering takes off, and FreedomWorks starts running TV ads, and Focus on the Family blankets their mailing list with dire fundraising letters, and disgruntled military brass start leaking -- well, that's a whole different ballgame."

To wit, here's James Bowman in the Weekly Standard:

" 'Don't ask, don't tell' is a tribute to our national talent for hypocrisy. Yes, President Clinton was prepared to agree, homosexual acts might be a risk to the high standards of morale, good order, discipline, and unit cohesion, but if nobody knew about them, then what harm could they do? Since then, nobody has thought up a better way of coping with this thorny problem. The left has nothing better to offer than riding roughshod over the opinions of the majority of servicemen--58 percent in the latest Military Times poll--and repealing the law. The same poll found that 10 percent of respondents would leave the service if gays were allowed openly to serve and another 14 percent would consider leaving. We have at least to take seriously the possibility that this would be the price of treating military service as a human right.

"This it clearly cannot be. There are all kinds of people -- the very young and the very old, the sick or disabled, violent criminals or, in combat roles, women -- whom we regard as unfit to be soldiers. The fact that open homosexuals are also excluded cannot by itself be considered an injustice."

I wonder what a poll of servicemen would have showed when the armed forces were integrated in the late 1940s.

A question of trust

Rich Lowry suggests that the president doesn't practice what he preaches:

"It isn't that people haven't heard all this before from Obama; it's that they don't believe it. This is what Obama refers to as "a deficit of trust."

"To heal it, he plugged for more lobbyist disclosure. Is that going to stop the White House from, say, cutting deals to give unions special exemptions from taxes? Obama must have a truly audacious faith in the forgetfulness and credulity of the public.

"The president has a reality problem. He's crafted a fantasy universe where he and his friends can live unperturbed by our center-right country, comforted by just-so stories. The rest of us can only, like Justice Alito, crinkle our noses and mutter, 'Not true.' "

Pop quiz

Does the GOP pay a price for obstructionism? Washington Monthly's Steve Benen points to a Pew Research in arguing why it doesn't:

"Just 32% know that the Senate passed its version of the [health] legislation without a single Republican vote. And, in what proved to be the most difficult question on the quiz, only about a quarter (26%) knows that it takes 60 votes to break a filibuster in the Senate and force a vote on a bill.

"This obviously poses a serious political problem. Americans don't really know what's in the Democratic health care reform proposal, but just as important, the vast majority of Americans don't know what it takes to overcome a filibuster.

"It creates a situation in which the public sees a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, and doesn't understand why more isn't getting done.

"Democratic strategists and officials occasionally think Republicans will be punished for their unprecedented, reflexive obstructionism. But it's worth remembering that most of the public doesn't really follow this stuff."

What the?

"Actor Rip Torn has been charged with breaking into a Connecticut bank and carrying a loaded handgun while intoxicated.

"State police say the 78-year-old Salisbury resident was arrested Friday night after police found him inside the Litchfield Bancorp with a loaded revolver."

Because you had to know

Eliot Spitzer addresses the socks question.

Howard Kurtz also works for CNN and hosts its weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."