"How come you don't do 'Iron Jay' anymore? That bit was hilarious!"

I don’t have a lot to say about President Obama’s Tonight Show appearance, but there’ll never be a better excuse for taking this blog out of mothballs.

Clearly, this is an attempt by Obama to get around what his predecessor infamously referred to as the “filter”–that is, the mainstream news media–in order to speak directly to “the people.” Given how awful the news media has become, I think this is perfectly defensible. Leno let Obama speak at some length, and his questions, while not especially insightful, were no more trivial than those typically heard in The Situation Room, or from the other side of the Meet the Press desk. Leno’s no great shakes as an interviewer, but he knew to keep the focus on  his interviewee, and to stay on topic. Until the last, light-hearted segment, it was a relatively substantive interview.

It was not, however, a challenging one (though Jay deserves credit for poking the Pres. when he appeared to be overselling Geithner’s responsibility for the AIG mess).  It would be interesting to see how Obama would do with Jon Stewart or David Letterman. But that, of course, would defeat the other, less legitimate reason for “reaching out” via late-night TV: it’s not much of a risk. Obama going on Leno is hardly the same as Bush appearing on FOX News, but the probability of tough questioning is about the same–albeit for different reasons. (I’m not suggesting Leno’s “in the tank” for Obama, as Rupert’s crew was for Bush–just that Leno can be counted on to defer to Big Stars, whether from showbiz or politics, in a way that neither Stewart nor Letterman can.)

On the “Special Olympics” gaffe: Jaime Wieman has a good take (I love how he calls ABC jackass Jake Tapper the network’s “senior trivia correspondent”). It was unclear to me whether the joke was merely a self-deprecating comment on that still-low 129 score, or a characterization of Leno’s condescending applause (watch again, and see what you think). If it was the latter, that’s a little more impressive demonstration of quick-wittedness, and wickedness, in the sense of betraying a darker sensibility.

In any event, it was pretty inexcusable. I support Obama, and think he has used humor well, for the most part, but you just don’t do jokes about the Special Olympics on The Tonight Show. Especially if you’re President of the United States.

Leno poses with one of his 16,784 (est.) cars

Much has already been said about Jay Leno’s move to prime time. Jaime Weinman and Mark Evanier have some interesting insights into what NBC might be thinking, though for my money, political blogger Attaturk had the best one-line reaction: “Paddy Chayevsky was an optimist.”

I will confess that I find Leno hard to watch. And although I can certainly identify things that annoy me—the predictability of his punchlines, his Arsenio-like insincerity with guests, the faux-macho bluster that has crept into his persona over the last few years, his blatant stylistic stealing from Letterman, and especially his creepy and borderline racist on-camera relationship with bandleader/toady Kevin “Heh-heh-heh” Eubanks—I can’t put my finger on the cause of this visceral dislike.

I almost wish I liked him better. He is, after all, the late-night ratings champ—has been for years. I feel like a snob for disliking him. I respect his work ethic, and the fact that he’s honoring the Carson legacy by doing a long, topical monologue chock-full of well-crafted (if predictable) topical jokes—jokes that aren’t “meta”-jokes, but jokes that are actually about what they’re about. I’d like to think that’s not a lost art.

I’ll even confess to actually enjoying “Jay-Walking”—which a lot of Leno detractors point to as the nadir of Lenoism. I actually think some of the criticism of this bit—”it’s hypocritical to expose the stupidity of the average American, while playing to an audience made up of similarly low-information, ‘average’ viewers”—itself smacks of a complicated kind of elitism. It’s okay to say Leno’s viewers are stupid, but terrible of him to go out exposing their stupidity. I don’t know; I think it’s a kind of Public Service.

That said, the move to 10 o’clock (9 Central) is a kind of watershed moment. Part of the reason late-night has been the place for “political” humor is the assumption that the audience was more adult and “sophisticated.” In the old days, Johnny hosted a grown-up cocktail party after the Cleaver kids had gone to bed. The subject matter discussed, and the whole tone of The Tonight Show had a different feel than the “for young-and-old” paradigm of Prime Time.

Of course, this is an oversimplification. More than that, it’s extremely dated: the “family-friendliness” of Prime Time was never all that solidly established, and waxed and waned for decades before being definitively abandoned in recent years. Nothing could be less wholesome than “Survivor”-style reality shows, which have for some time been common in what was once the “Family Hour.” And that’s just the networks. I think MTV now reserves that time slot for The Meth-Addicted Prostitute ‘n’ Backstabbing Sociopath Super Team-Up Product-Placement Hour.

But competitive sluttery and bug-eating contests are one thing; politics is something else. The day after NBC’s big announcement, Countdown’s Keith Olbermann (looking a little embarrassed about participating in this boundary-blurring moment of newsertainment corporate synergy) asked Leno about breaking political humor’s time barrier. In face, he asked twice, but Leno more or less ducked the question, offering little more than the lame and self-serving “observation” that “people are going to bed earlier” nowadays (something about the economy forcing more people to take public transportation, and therefore to get up an hour earlier, blah, blah, blah…for a multi-millionaire who owns an airplane hanger full of cars, Jay’s got his finger on the pulse of his viewers’ commuting habits).

In fact, the further mainstreaming of Leno-style topical comedy is yet another sign of how commonplace the cynical notion that politics is just a big, bipartisan clown show has become. It’s the premise not only of traditional, “equal opportunity offender” topical comedy, but also the rhetorical home base of newschat, on cable and Sunday morning network shows. Why not have the comedic version of this in prime time? The “serious” version is running 24-hours a day on CNN.

The good news—or the glimmer of hope, anyway—is that network TV thinking is almost always a step or two behind the times. And the times, they really could be a-changing. I cling to the hope that a lot of people are fed up with what passes for political journalism, political comedy, and political “sophistication” (i.e., utter cynicism). While Leno’s invasion of Prime Time may look like the establishment of a new beachhead for this kind of thinking, it could end up being a Bridge Too Far. After all, people who want political humor that is actually humorous, and has something to say about politics, aren’t going to bed earlier—they’re watching Stewart and Colbert.

I am elated (and relieved) by the outcome of the election, and even, dare I say, a little bit hopeful about this country’s immediate future. Thanks voters, and thank God!

I’m as tired of thinking about politics as I imagine most of you are, which is why I’ve let a few recent things slide without posting. Here’s a few links worth a look, though.

Tina Fey interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air. Interesting behind-the-scenes stuff about how Fey honed her impression, including generous praise for the contributions of make-up and wardrobe people. I’ve always found Fey to be a little (just a little) overrated; her Palin was pretty good, and I like her as 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon, but the quality of SNL during her stint as head writer was only marginally better than it is now, and I often found her performance as “Weekend Update” co-anchor annoying. The constant meta-commentary (“I love that joke/see what we did there?”) destroyed the parodic framework. Since Fey, it’s impossible to think of “W.U.” as a “newscast,” even a “fake” one. It’s just people sitting there telling jokes, and looking pleased with themselves — a two-headed sit-down Leno, with a side-order of smirk. Yet this same tendency to deconstruct makes Fey a good interview: her explanation of the Palin performance is truly fascinating.

Speaking of Palin and SNL, Caribou Barbie herself (I’d credit the person who coined that name, if I knew who it was — I’m also partial to “Bible Spice,” though I don’t know who started that one, either) made a cameo appearance on Monday night’s “Presidential Bash” that was compellingly unfunny. I can’t decide if it’s because the writing is straining to be mean-spirited (they gave her several anti-NBC “zingers”), or if it results from the fact that the segment appears to have been pretaped without an audience, or if Palin just didn’t sell it, somehow. Actually, I don’t think it’s the latter, though when it comes to comedy performance, she’s no John McCain.

And yes, I thought he acquitted himself pretty well on Saturday. Per Urk’s comment, I do think this was a first step toward rehabilitating his image, and I’ll admit it even stirred some dormant “maybe he’s not that bad” feelings in this viewer.

But then I remembered all the “socialist” crap, and “that one,” and — well, and the whole rotten, sleazy campaign he ran.

One last thing — not really a “leftover,” but a lingering annoyance that threatens to dampen my post-election mood: the continuing awfulness of our corporate news media. The country may have turned a big corner, but the idiocy of our pundit class remains, epitomized by Foster Brooks Tom Brokaw, in a moment that earned him “Blithering Idiot of the Day” status from Atrios.

Now that we’ve thrown the rascals out of the White House, we should think about cleaning out the press room. Talk about a change America needs!

I’ve been griping about Jon Stewart’s McCain-love for some time now, and Thursday night he finally came out and said that if McCain had won the GOP’s nomination in 2000, he would have voted for him, instead of Gore. (The video’s here, but be warned: you have to watch several minutes of Bill Kristol, love-child of Goebbels and The Joker, to hear the quote.)

I know the campaign McCain has run in 2008 has shocked and surprised a lot of people who admired him in 2000. I’ll admit that even I had some respect for him back then. But I wouldn’t have voted for him. And I certainly wouldn’t have voted for him over Al Gore, a candidate I supported wholeheartedly.

I’ve always had a hard time understanding what people had against Gore in 2000. And by “people,” I guess I mean Democrats. At my caucus in Iowa City (a college town in what Iowans call “The People’s Republic of Johnson County”), the “cool kids” all supported Bill Bradley. Bradley was supposed, by these folks, to be the “liberal alternative” to Gore, but I never understood the basis of this judgment. The graduate students’ union, COGS, had sent out a mass e-mailing showing that every labor, environmental, and civil rights outfit that compiled “ratings” on legislators’ voting records, and by every measure, Gore was more liberal than Bradley. Didn’t matter. (COGS itself, thanks to the presence of a plurality of trust-fund socialist idiots, endorsed Ralph F-ing Nader. I would like to retroactively resign, based on that alone. Idiots.)

Once Gore got the nomination, his support remained soft. I’ll admit he was in many ways a lousy candidate, but a lot of people who should have been able to see past that and admit he would have been a good president were still unwilling to do so. There was just something about the guy they didn’t like.

I think I know what it was. It’s the same thing that let George W. Bush, until quite recently (and how quickly we’ve forgotten this) coast along, despite numerous blunders and obvious stupidity, as a fairly popular president. It’s the same thing that has kept John McCain looking like an Ideal Leader until, you know, he actually had to run (whereupon we — or at least more of us — finally saw him for the ill-informed, erratic egoist he’s always been). It’s the same thing that beat Mondale in ‘84, Carter in ‘80, and Stevenson in ‘52 and ‘56. For that matter, it’s the same thing that helped JFK edge out Nixon in 1960.

It’s one of the governing principles, not only of American government, but American life. And though we associate it with High School, it starts in the sandbox and ends in the graveyard.

It’s Jocks vs. Nerds.

Two recent articles brought this into focus for me. One is a  Joel Stein piece in Time, titled “The Urkel Effect,” in which Stein predicts trouble down the road for our presumptive Nerd-in-Chief. Obama may not strike most people as particularly nerdy, but Stein makes a good case — and there’s no question former high-school bully and bad student John “Nasty” McCain is the “jock” in 2008’s comparison.

The other piece is John Hodgman’s Onion AV Club interview (Hodgman is also quoted in Stein’s piece — he’s the Nerd of the Moment, I guess). Hodgman talked a little about the eternal battle between Jocks and Nerds, but also had a lot to say about politics, including this intriguing bit of behind-the-scenes insight:

I have misgivings now about McCain that I never had before. I was never going to support him for President, because even though in 2000 he was the kind of Republican that Democrats liked and he can be real nice when he wants to be and, certainly, he has been a great friend to The Daily Show. People there love him and they are people that I love so I trust there’s something lovable there. But would I pal around with him? I bet he’s probably a great guy to have a round of beer with or whatever the latest folksy kind of way of putting is. I would like to IM with him, you know, but I was never going to vote for him. [Emphasis added.]

Hodgman, who sees himself as a Nerd, is immune to McCain’s charms. Would that this were true of Tom Brokaw, Chris Matthews, Charlie Gibson, David Broder, David Gregory, most of the national press corps, both broadcast and print, “Reagan Democrats,” non-millionaires who for some reason vote Republican, etc., etc., etc.

If only it were true for Jon Stewart. But Stewart, despite his Nerd-cred, is a Jock-lover at heart.

It may sound like I’m taking this personally — and I am (why write a blog if you can’t take things personally?) — but I truly think there’s something deeper here. Our culture worships strength. We glorify confidence. We vote — over, and over, and over again — for Men of Action, who seem Bold and Decisive.

Look where it’s gotten us.

I think eight years of Gore’s nerd-leadership would have been a great thing for this country. I hope an Obama presidency will leave the legacy of bully-boys like Bush and McCain in the dust, but Big Strong Men and the littler, weaker men who look up to them still loom large in our national psyche.

I’ll end this rant with Hodgman, who, in the course of answering a question about expertise, brings it all back home:

There is a need for expertise, for real expertise. I’m not doing much to help that cause, but I think we can find the healthy balance between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. Jocks and nerds may come together, I believe it. I believe it is so. But only the nerds will save the earth.

Today’s installment of NPR’s Fresh Air featured an interview with SNL head writer and “Weekend Update” anchor Seth Meyers. He came across as an articulate and pleasant fellow, generous in his praise for colleague Tina Fey, boss Lorne Michaels, and recent guest-star Sarah Palin — and as an uninspired and workman-like creator of mass-market comedy. Seth Meyers is to comedy what an Applebee’s entree is to food: reliably palatable, but nothing memorable.

On further reflection, that’s pretty unfair to Applebee’s. Maybe he’s more like a Denny’s Grand Slam: not great, but readily available and unlikely to make you actually vomit.

Two things from the interview jumped out at me as worthy of comment. First, he called Amy Poehler’s delivery of the Sarah Palin rap (I’m paraphrasing, but this is close) “one of the best performances in the history of Saturday Night Live.”

Okay, maybe the Denny’s comparison is too generous. How about Jack in the Box: usually okay, but with occasional e. coli poisoning.

The other notable comment came in Meyers’s recounting of Palin’s cameo appearance. What was “great” about it, according to Meyers, is that (paraphrasing, again — the show has not yet been posted online, so I’m going by memory from what I heard) “liberals liked it because, ‘yeah, you slammed her,’ and conservatives liked it because they thought she did great. So that’s great, for balance.”

I’ve heard countless variations on this notion, from both topical comedians and journalists. The journalistic version usually goes something like, “Liberals accused us of a conservative bias and conservatives accused us of a liberal bias. If you’ve got both sides mad at you, you must be doing something right.”

This is a deeply ingrained tenet of conventional wisdom; it may even be the Rosetta Stone of conventional wisdom, at least inasfar as it applies to the way the public discussion of politics ought to be conducted. It is also completely stupid.

There is a case to be made for journalistic objectivity (though even that standard should not be accepted as the only potentially useful one). But what we usually get instead is “balance,” which, in practice, usually means that every potentially “one-sided” truth (to use a hypothetical example, “Republicans drink the blood of orphans”) must be presented in with a side of false equivalency (“…but some say that Democrats would raise taxes on orphans making over $250K, which is also bad”). Phew! Thank God we found a way to cover that story while angering “both sides”!

As bad as this “balancing” game can be for news, it at least arises out of a defensible principle: an ideal world of public discourse ought to contain at least some sources that can be relied upon to present facts with as little interpretive bias as is humanly possible. Exposing one side’s crimes while ignoring the other’s is unfair and — in the presence of a claim of “objectivity” — dishonest. Still, this does not mean, as the false-equivalency tic implies, that there is some pseudo-Newtonian law of nature ensuring that every misdeed of the Left is matched by an equal and opposite misdeed by the Right, or vice versa.

Comedy, however, has no professional or moral obligation to be “objective.” I may not like some of the satirical points South Park makes, but I don’t feel Parker and Stone are under any obligation to placate me by acknowledging my “side.” I despise most of what Dennis Miller says, but I’ll defend to the death his right to say it, Cha-chi.

But SNL puts a premium on “balance,” as Meyers’s comments indicate, and the show’s content proves. I would guess this is one reason — even the main reason — most of their topical comedy is so toothless (yes, even lately). The show that built its reputation on offending, often and ostentatiously, is terrified of offending unevenly. This is because SNL, like Leno, but unlike Miller, Maher, and South Park, is strictly an “establishment” show.

It’s been that way long enough now that it’s hard to be sad about it anymore. But lately I’ve seen more and more evidence that The Daily Show is headed down the same, safe road.

Monday’s show had one of the flimsiest and most egregiously disingenuous exercises in false equivalency I’ve ever seen on a comedy program. Correspondent John Oliver visited an Obama rally and a Palin event, with the intent of “proving” that the attendees were the same — specifically, that they were equally motivated by irrational fears.

The flaw in this premise is that it is not remotely true. Yes, both candidates have some idiotic supporters who will say stupid things when you point a camera in their direction. Yes, people will often say they are “afraid” of what will happen if the “other side” wins; and yes, some of those fears are unreasonable or exaggerated.

But the Obama supporters’ fears were almost all grounded in objective reality, related to policy differences, while the Palin supporters’ fears were almost all based on insane falsehoods about Obama. An Obama supporter feared a McCain win would jeopardize Roe v. Wade; a Palin supporter feared Obama would, once inaugurated, don a turban and impose Shariah law.

Watch it yourself, and see what I mean. The fears of one “side” are in no way equivalent to those of the other, despite the premise of the piece and the back-and-forth editing. Even the wackiest Obamite (the guy who goes on and on about how McCain doesn’t understand Internet technology) is merely obnoxious, whereas the baseline of the Palin supporters is tinfoil hat-wearing crazy.

Tuesday night’s show followed this up with the laziest form of “bipartisan” comedy of them all: the “elections are dumb” premise, featuring Wyatt Cenac in an “equal time” anti-political time-waster.

To be fair, Stewart has finally hit McCain hard on a few deserved points. And if he has hard questions for Obama tonight (or hard comedy for him later), that’s fine with me — as long as it’s not done to achieve “balance,” or in the name of being “equal opportunity offenders.”

Jon, with all due respect, we already have a Seth Meyers, and the Establishment already has its topical comedy shows. We expect more out of you and TDS.

Sarah Palin’s cameo on SNL doesn’t seem to have moved the needle very much, on way or the other, in terms of the public’s perception of the GOP VP candidate. To borrow a very nice turn of phrase from New Hampshire journalist/blogger Gina Carbone, I don’t think it will turn out to be her “saxophone moment.” It was probably both too little (she didn’t risk very much in her two rather staid spots on the show) and too late for that.

Still, she came off reasonably well: she looked like a good sport, didn’t trip over her lines, seemed to be in on all the jokes, and generally performed like the former broadcast professional she is (given her train-wreck performance in unscripted interviews, it’s easy to forget she was once a TV sportscaster — as long as she’s got a teleprompter, she’s fine). Indeed, Lorne Michaels said afterward that Palin could easily have “her own show” — a compliment, though perhaps a back-handed one. (Though if, as Mark Evanier speculates, Palin has given up on succeeding Cheney and is instead gunning to be the next Ann Coulter, I guess she passed the audition.)

The most often-cited reason for politicians to appear on SNL, Letterman, The Daily Show, et al., is that it has a “humanizing” effect. Leaving aside that looking too “human” can be a dangerous thing for an office-seeker, this effect is undeniably real. Comedy — especially the caricature / impression-based comedy SNL employs — turns real people into abstractions. These abstractions, thanks to their “catchiness” and constant repetition (another feature of TV generally, and SNL especially), take on a life of their own. The ability to create and maintain such abstractions as “McCain = old,” “Clinton = horndog,” and “Palin = airhead,” though certainly not the highest form of satire, probably accounts for the lion’s share of late-night’s actual political influence.

Yet by simply showing up, and showing that there is “more to” you than that — that there is a real person, more complex and sympathetic, behind the caricature — a politician can undermine the power of those abstractions, at least a little bit.

In human terms, this is a good thing: irrational hatreds are hard to maintain when we are reminded that our enemies are “only human.” It was hard for David Letterman to stay mad at McCain when he sat right next to him and admitted he “screwed up” — and it was hard for the viewers, too. I think one reason Obama’s been gaining since the debates is that the real person people saw on their screens was so much more normal, reasonable, and moderate than the abstract-expressionist horror his opponents have been painting for the past few months.

But in political terms, is it good to see so much of the “human” side of political actors? Since Congressman John Lewis brought up George Wallace a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been pondering that.

If Wallace were alive today, would Saturday Night Live invite him to appear, alongside the inevitable Wallace-impersonating cast member? Could Lorne Michaels and Company, under the banner of anti-political “neutrality” and “equal-opportunity offense” allow such a candidate the opportunity to show his good sportsmanship? Would SNL let itself be a party to “humanizing” Wallace?

Given the Standard Operating Procedures that put “balance” ahead of all other considerations (defensible within the realm of news, I suppose, but a baffling standard for comedy), I don’t see how they could refuse.

This is not to equate Palin or McCain with Wallace (though it’s worth noting that Wallace was more a cynical exploiter of racism than a sincere racist himself — which I think is crucial to understanding the point of Lewis’s comparison). But when your central, operating premise is that all politicians are alike, and all politics is a joke, where do you draw the line?

Currently, anybody expressing Wallace’s naked racism would be relegated to the political fringe. But he was far from a “fringe” candidate (only) 40 years ago, when he carried 5 states and won 13.5% of the popular vote. The borders of the “fringe” are not fixed; how far could they shift before “equal-opportunity offenders” refused to normalize their views, and “humanize” those who espouse them?

Long time, no post. I’ll have something more substantial to say soon, but I wanted to pass along this snippet from an Onion AV Club interview with Daily Show “resident expert John Hodgman:

The thing that I find so compelling is that right now Obama’s whole campaign strategy is simply [to] speak to people as though they were adults and trust that the truth of the world situation will be evident to them. For him to be attacked as a friend of a terrorist, for “palling” around with terrorists and to simply go back and say, “No, I’m not”? That was such a refreshing political moment. …I’m enchanted by the idea that a politician can come along and speak simply and clearly and truthfully to an electorate as though they are grown-ups and to feel the electorate respond to that. I’ve found that to be astonishing and especially now that we are in the end game and you see basically the McCain campaign has nothing left but conspiracy theories to throw at Obama. It really has become a fight between fantasy and reality, and although I don’t make my living off of it, I endorse reality.

It’s a wide-ranging interview, but Hodgman speaks frankly and at length about his own political views, which is refreshing in and of itself, considering the usual disingenuousness of late-night comics asked what they “really” think. You can read the whole thing here (while you’re in the neighborhood, you should also check out their interview with another of my Daily Show favorites, Samantha Bee).

Hodgman’s comments on Obama encapsulate something I’ve been thinking about for a while: I love this candidate. I’m almost embarrassed to admit how much I love him (especially given all the messianic mockery directed at Obama and his supporters). It’s not because I think he’s perfect, or that every policy position he takes is the right one, or that he somehow transcends politics.

I love him because he doesn’t talk to us like we’re idiots.

This is not to say Obama doesn’t pander, on occassion — he does. But it’s not his primary mode, like it is with so many politicians. It’s not to say other politicians aren’t as smart, or even smarter: Bill Clinton has a world-class intellect. But he sometimes talks to us like we’re idiots, and not just when he’s saying he did not have sexual relations with that woman. Hillary — another very smart person — also seemed to assume the rest of us were dopes, most of the time (Crown Royal, anyone?). Bush is a pea-brain himself, but when it comes to talking down to the American people, that doesn’t seem to stand in his way.

The media, with a few rare exceptions, also treat us like the proverbial 12-year old for whom newspaper editors and J-school professors have always instructed writers to tailor their prose.

The thing about that is, if you create and maintain a model of discourse based on the presumption that people are stupid, they will either:

A.) become stupid, or

B.) wise up, and start to resent you

We’ve seen option A. play itself out for the last eight years. We — or enough of us, anyway — were dumb enough to go to war against the wrong country, let corporations rob us blind, and count 9/11 and the terrorism “issue” as a plus for Bush (that one still baffles me). But now we (or, I hope, enough of us, anyway) are wising up.

If Obama is, as he seems to be, the Man of the Moment, that’s a big part of the reason why: not because we’re “ready” for a black president, or even because we’re ready for “change.”

It’s because we’re ready to be treated like intelligent adults.

Joe

Unlike Sarah Palin’s favorite Joe (Sixpack), Joe the Plumber is at least a real person.

He’s less of a real plumber, or at any rate not an average one: the average, journeyman clog-wrangler earns about $42 grand a year. Joe Wurzelbacher is worried about the possibility that he will soon climb into the $250K+ bracket which would, indeed, mean his income tax rate would go up under Obama’s plan. (Though he appears not to really understand the distinctions between personal income and the value of a business, to say nothing of the various deductions of which an entrepreneur can take advantage. Maybe Joe the Plumber needs to have a chat with Stu the Accountant.)

But Wurzelbacher’s existence as a real, tax-paying citizen has, from the moment McCain fumblingly introduced him into last night’s debate, become secondary to his symbolic role in the 2008 presidential campaign.

It was McCain’s intention to do this, but the symbols you create don’t always accomplish the ends you intend them for. “Joe the Plumber” is supposed to be a compelling symbol of the average American; but it was clear to most of us the moment we heard of him that he was actually, like Poochie (above, at left), “a soulless by-product of committee thinking.”

In this case, the committee was John McCain’s campaign staff, who like the network suits in that back-when-they-were-good Simpsons episode, decided, in what shrewd-observer Lisa identified as “a desperate attempt to boost low ratings,” to add something new.

Poochie didn’t capture the public’s fancy, but I think Joe will catch on — just not in the way McCain and his desperate advisers intended. I think he’s likely to become, in very short order, a punchline. In fact, I think he was a punchline from the moment he was introduced, as “Joe…Wurtzelburger.” (Not to pile on the Simpsons references, but did anybody else think, for a moment, that McCain was stumbling over the name because he was making it up, a la “Joey Jo-Jo Juniour…Shabadoo”?)

Poor Joe. He’s about to join the ranks of G. David Schine (Joe McCarthy), Bebe Rebozo (Richard Nixon), and Long Dong Silver (Clarence Thomas) — people turned into walking punchlines through their associations with politicians (though Mr. Silver had his own basis for infamy prior to the Thomas hearings). Regardless of the validity of his concerns (and I suspect he wouldn’t vote for Obama in any case), this unfortunate man probably deserves better than the treatment he will receive at the hands of the late-night jokers. He’s a more-or-less innocent bystander — a volunteer to be dragged up on the stage and humiliated in a failed bit of political theater.

I only hope the McCain campaign doesn’t try to write him off their show by explaining he had to return to his home planet.

Time’s James Poniewozik has some interesting insights into the possible impact of Tina Fey’s impression on the public’s impression of Sarah Palin. On the one hand, he notes, an impression that succeeds in capturing what the public sees in a candidate — as Fey’s Palin surely has — can be devastating because it is “shamanistic; it’s like owning a voodoo doll: capture your target’s soul, and you can make her dance just by waving your arms.” Fey “owns” Palin’s image in this sense.

And make no mistake, that is a powerful thing. Chevy Chase’s depiction of Gerald Ford, though it was not even really an impression — let alone a very convincing one like Fey’s Sarah Palin — had a huge claim on the public’s perception of the man, and probably contributed to his political downfall.

This is why, in spite of SNL’s attempts to “balance” their attacks in Thursday night’s debate sketch (and to aim the most pointed barbs at the safest target, moderator Tom Browkaw), McCain got the worst of it: Hammond’s McCain is a better, sharper, more definitive character than Armisen’s Obama. This is not purely a matter of which performer is the more skillful mimic (Hammond, by a country mile); rather, it’s a matter of finding a trait, or set of traits, that can be successfully exploited within the sketch-comedy format. Chase had Ford’s perceived clumsiness and absent-mindedness (or less charitably, dumbness) to work with; Hammond has McCain’s (again, perceived) creeping senility (forgeting questioner’s names), “Mavericky” instability, distinctive physicality (the damaged posture and stiff movements), and “my friends” to work with. Armisen has Obama’s halting cadence (which he doesn’t even capture that well), but little else. The sketch’s attacks on Obama were mostly limited to the substance of what he (the character) said.

There’s something inherently unfair about this, of course. Both the news media and most of the comedy-industrial complex (especially the traditional late-night shows) pay way too much attention to style, too little to substance. And given sketch comedy’s methods, and SNL’s still considerable influence, the fact that the politician who is easier to imitate is bound to get the worst of it ought to give us pause. As an Obama supporter, I can’t help but be grateful that they haven’t quite gotten a handle on him (though they never really got one on Kerry, either), but I do recognize that as Hammond’s McCain has come into focus, it has simultaneously gotten more devastating and more purely ad hominem, and unfair.

Of course, Fey’s Palin was like this right out of the gate, due not only to the ease with which she can be impersonated, but to the uncanny resemblance between the portrayer and the portrayed. Talk about being a victim of circumstance. It’s analogous to having a face that’s easy to caricature; even if he hadn’t been a paranoid crook, Richard Nixon looked like one. Herblock and other cartoonists got a gift there, just as Fey did with Palin.

But there’s another wrinkle here, and Poniewozik sees it clearly:

But SNL may also have given [Palin] cover on the campaign trail. Fey’s Palin is no love letter — falsely confident, hapless, antiscience and calculatedly adorable — but she’s harmless compared with the Real Palin we’ve seen lately: a culture warrior cannily playing on resentments, a mouthpiece for the McCain campaign’s ugliest character attacks on Barack Obama.

The characterization of George W. Bush as a sort of hapless idiot worked the same way: it overwhelmed and even obliterated other, perhaps more important, aspects of his policies and his character. As Al Franken has argued, the perception of Bush as stupid led the public and the press to excuse his dishonesty, and blame his subordinates for mistakes that were his responsibility:

When South Carolinians get push polls saying John McCain fathered an illegitimate black child, you know Karl Rove had something to do with it. But it’s really Bush. When our energy policy is set by cronies from the oil, coal, and sutomobile industries, you can shake your fist at Dick Cheney. But it’s Bush. When Ari Fleischer feeds rumors that the Clinton people vandalized the White House, doing $200,000 worth of damage, but months later a GAO report says that sin’t true, you can say that Ari Fleishcer is a chimp. And he is. But it’s Bush.

The same thing applies to both Palin and McCain, and the perceptions SNL has locked down of their respective personas: When their supporters yell out things like “terrorist,” and “kill him,” you can absolve McCain and Palin from any blame, because after all, he’s just a senile old fool, and she’s an out-of-her-depth, naive dope. But that’s letting them get away with the same kind of stuff “dummy” Bush has gotten away with for the past 8 years. They know what they’re doing, and they should be held responsible.

Before I get to the whining, the New York Times’s Bill Carter, the Woodward and/or Bernstein of the late-night comedy beat, has an interesting article on how the election is boosting the fortunes of SNL and other shows. It includes some interesting ratings info, showing the Comedy Central shows’ strength in the 18-34 year-old male demographic.

Via Mark Evanier, news that tonight’s prime-time SNL special will be a weekly feature up until the election. For some reason, this news fills me with foreboding.

One reason is the fact that, in addition to the easy (if funny) shots they’ve been taking at Sarah Palin, SNL has, in the name of “balance,” also become one of the Mainstream Media’s principle conduits for the dissemination of bizarre, right-wing talking points. A case in point is the angry, tedious bailout sketch I wrote about a few days ago, which presented an Oliver Stone-like conspiracy theory that managed to blame everybody but the party that’s been running things for most of the last eight years for the current economic mess.

Circumstances have now elevated this dull piece of agitprop into a cause celebré. You can read the story — and the most depressing set of comments I’ve ever seen — here. In short, though, it seems that Herb and Marion Sandler, the real-life couple depicted by Darrell Hammond and Casey Wilson, did not appreciate being identified in a caption as “people who should be shot.” Who knew network television shows couldn’t advocate the murder of individual citizens who are borderline public figures? How are you supposed to write comedy if you can’t identify people you’d like killed?

The worst part of this whole mess is that it gives Republicans yet another chance to whine about their “victimization” at the hands of the “liberal media.” Listen: you can’t use network airtime to identify real people, who just barely fit the definition of “public figures,” as worthy of being shot. No matter how loathsome the Sandlers may actually be, this is a pretty clear-cut abuse of the broadcast platform.

Second, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow aside, “the MSM” and even the hated NBC are not “liberal” by any sane definition. Meet the Press was, under the late non-liberal Tim Russert, Dick Cheney’s favorite forum for disseminating his radical left-wing worldview. Tom Brokaw comes a runnin’ like Uncle Tom every time Whiney McCain stamps his little feet — yes, your Maverickness, I’ll get Olbermann off the anchor desk; yes, I know we’ve been naughty and don’t deserve a sit-down with Governor Palin.

And SNL isn’t “liberal,” either. The fact that a sketch like this got on the air to begin with (I repeat: “George Soros? Really?”) ought to prove that. Not to mention Lorne Michaels’s contributions to the McCain campaign.

Yes, Michaels has given to Democrats, too; and SNL has certainly taken plenty of shots at Republicans. But the “balance” game, whether it’s played by comedy shows or newspeople, is unwinnable; the fix is in. Conservatives will never stop whining about how “unfair” the “liberal media” is. Even if NBC moved so far to the right it was indistinguishable from Fox News, the righties would still whine. It’s crucial to their self-definition. The conviction that the “MSM” is victimizing them is a more important tenet of modern conservativism than supply-side economics (or whatever they’re calling it now), opposition to Roe v. Wade, or homophobia. It defines them. It provides the “them” to their “us.”

Whatever Tom Brokaw or Lorne Michaels do to appease or cater to them, it will never, ever be enough. But rather than accept that reality, they and the rest of the cowardly, craven media will continue to legitimize the farthest fringes of right-wing “thought” in the guise of fair-n-balanced, “equal-opportunity-offender” neutrality. But it’s not “neutral.” It’s nuts. It’s a game they can’t win, but one which the public they are supposedly obligated to serve (an obligation I believe satirists share) can certainly lose.