Notes on Politics: I Wish Presidential Candidates Would Stop Going on Comedy Shows

It's supposed to humanize them, make the voters see that they're more than starched shirts and talking points.

But what then-Governor Bill Clinton made popular by jamming on the saxophone while wearing shades on Arsenio Hall's show -- and giving a substantive interview afterward -- has gotten a little old. It's no longer fresh and novel. Presidential candidates are already so overexposed in the media that watching them attempt to be humorous on late night comedy shows, when they seem like they're going through the motions, is like watching them check off a must-do on their campaign list like eat rubbery pancakes in a New Hampshire diner or wax poetic about butter at an Iowa fair.

The life has been sucked out of these appearances because the sticky fingerprints of the campaign advisers are all over them. When I watch presidential candidates on these shows nowadays as they attempt to be "regular" people, they smack of inauthenticity because it's blatantly obvious that they're trying too hard to be real. And when you have to try to be real, you aren't.

Take President Obama on Jimmy Fallon the other night and "Slow Jamming" the news. Obama was trying to be wry and down with the humor, but his appearance felt flat. Sure, he used the news about the potential doubling of interest rates on college loans as his jumping off point (a serious issue), but with Fallon (whom I love) rapping about the "Preezie of the United Steezie" and the "Barackness Monster," trivializes the issue and muddles Obama's message. What's next, Mitt Romney "Slow Jamming" the news and talking about the income tax rates? He's kind of got to "Slow Jam" the news now, doesn't he? God help us.



When Romney went on David Letterman (twice!) and did the Top 10 List (twice!), it was like watching a second grader who'd been compelled to read a poem he didn't quite understand on Poetry Day in front of an audience of his classmates' parents: Stiff, artificial and clearly just following orders. "What's up gangstas?" coming from Romney's lips is just ridiculous. We're not voting for comedian-in-chief.

While I like seeing famous people being themselves as much as anyone, the late night shows no longer seem like the right venue for presidential candidates to do that with all those awful, pre-scripted jokes. With a dour economy, high gas prices, escalating violence in Afghanistan and a potentially nuclear Iran, I am quite content to take a pass on a presidential candidate taking a pass on "Slow Jamming" and focus on how to deal with the fact that 65 percent of Americans believe our country is headed in the wrong direction.

Noteworthy People/Things/Events of 2009

The Notes from the Asylum list of noteworthy people, things and events of 2009, in no particular order . . .

Barack Obama inaugurated. That moment of national pride upon seeing the first African-American president sworn into office seems like a very long time ago. Since that cold January day in Washington, D.C. we’ve seen the president highlighted in the news for:

• The First Family’s search for a dog
• The Professor Gates imbroglio
• The question of whether Obama and the French president actually checked out a teenager’s booty in full view of the media
• A congressman shouting, “You lie” at the president during his address to Congress about the health insurance reform legislation
• The swine flu vaccine debacle (not enough vaccines despite government promises) and nationwide H1N1 scare (aided and abetted by Vice President Joe Biden’s I-wouldn’t-put-my-family-on-an-airplane-right-now comment on the Today Show)
• The contentious debates and town hall meetings about the health care legislation
• A controversial stimulus bill, with federal money being spent on some, um, controversial items
• The likes of AIG honchos getting mega-bonuses while unemployment numbers climb into the double-digits
• The federal government’s attempts to help revive the ailing U.S. automotive industry inspiring the nickname “Government Motors”
• The massacre at Fort Hood
• Tens of thousands of US troops being sent to Afghanistan
• The president killing a fly on camera.

Yes, it’s been a very long, weird freshman year for President Obama.

Sarah Palin, the former VP nominee who resigned the Alaska governorship this year. Hey, who says books are dead? Palin’s autobiography and well attended book tour events says books aren’t quite dead yet. At least all the attention paid to her book and her Oprah interview took the immature daddy of her grandson off out of the news, for a little while.

The season finale of Mad Men. Coupled with “The Gypsy and the Hobo” episode -- where Don finally confessed almost all of his dirty little secrets to his wife Betty -- these two episodes set the bar impossibly high for what it means to deliver intelligent, riveting, quality television. Completely. Besotted.

Morning Joe. The MSNBC talk show, which is always on in the kitchen as I get the kids ready for school on weekday mornings, boasts a lively mix of liberal and conservative ideologies, smart discussion and bar room humor all in one. It has had a great year and has earned my viewer loyalty.

Jon Hamm on SNL. Take note other celeb would-be Saturday Night Live hosts: Jon Hamm may have made being funny in the unevenly written sketch show LOOK easy when he hosted, but it’s not. Just ask his Mad Men co-star, January Jones. Oh, and those two actors being photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair earlier this year . . . those images constituted my favorite photo shoot of the year.

The Gosselin saga. Eight is enough apparently . . . especially when you throw some girlfriends into the mix. This was a sad, sad chapter in American pop culture lore where parents put their eight cute children in front of TV cameras for TLC's Jon & Kate Plus 8 and were then dismayed when those cameras wound up capturing the disintegration of their marriage. One might’ve hoped that this private-moment-made-public would’ve caused other parents to reconsider putting their kids on reality show programs. Alas, it didn’t.
 

Health and Human Services Sec'y Says, Nevermind About Those New Mammogram Guidelines

Following days of uproar after a federal government panel told fortysomething American women that regular mammogram screening doesn't save enough of their lives to justify the costs or the "anxiety" caused by biopsies and additional tests (which don't often result in a cancer diagnosis), the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services yesterday told everyone to basically ignore the new guidelines.

Maybe all those women who said their cancers were detected through routine screenings when they were in their 40s and said they would've been dead if they'd waited until age 50 -- as the new panel suggests women now do -- had an impact. Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement released yesterday:

"The task force has presented some new evidence for consideration but our policies remain unchanged. Indeed I would be very surprised if any private insurance company changed its mammography coverage decisions as a result of this action."

Given that during his speech to a joint session of Congress earlier fall President Obama said that under his health care reform plan ". . . [I]nsurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies because there's no reason we shouldn't be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse. That makes sense, it saves money, and it saves lives," it would be nice for the federal government to send a consistent message and not tell people that preventive care is important, then recommend that they not get it.

In the meantime, USA Today reported today that major health insurance company spokespeople are saying that they won't stop covering mammograms for women in their 40s as a result of the US Preventive Services Task Force guidelines:

"Some of the companies that told USA TODAY that they will continue paying for mammograms for women in their 40s include Kaiser Permanente, Aetna, Cigna, Geisinger Health Plan, Group Health Cooperative and WellPoint, which operates Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans in 14 states. Together, these plans cover more than 73 million people.

A spokeswoman for Kaiser Permanente, Farra Levin, says, 'We believe that focusing on prevention and early detection is critical in improving women's health and saving lives.'"

So that means that saving the lives of fortysomething women IS worth the cost of mammograms?

Cheap Shot: Palin on Newsweek Cover in Shorts

Seriously? Shorts?

Sure, dissect Sarah Palin's speeches, her book (being released this week), her interviews, her political point of view. All of that is fair game. (I’m going to be among those ODing on Palin-Palooza this week because I’m working on a column about the former GOP VP candidate.)

But putting Sarah Palin on the cover of a NEWSweekly while she’s wearing shorts (and I don’t care if the photo originally appeared in the pages of Runners World where males AND females are in running shorts; context is key) wreaks of sexism, as if they're trying to undermine her by the fact that she’s in shape and looks great. When was the last time Newsweek ran a photo of a male politician in shorts on its cover?

This spring I loudly griped when the Washingtonian ran the beefcake shirtless paparazzi shot of President Obama on its cover (the photo was taken when Obama was at the beach with his family, again, context). I thought that that cover was a disrespectful choice for editors at a magazine of Washingtonian’s ilk to make.

Last time I looked, Newsweek wasn’t gunning for the lad mag Maxim audience.

Image credit: Newsweek.