Late-night TV lets White House rivals laugh off campaign trail
Charlotte Raab

WASHINGTON—Far from rivals’ attacks and reporters’ questions, candidates for the White House this year have found a port in the storm that is the campaign trail, in the strange embrace of late-night TV. In recent weeks, each time Democrat Hillary Clinton has made a misstep on the trail, she has rushed to take the edge of issues heading straight to the couches of Americans’ favorite funnymen: the hosts of late-night comedy shows.
After the kerfuffle over her inaccurate claim that her jet took sniper fire in Bosnia, Clinton joked to Jay Leno on NBC “You know, I was worried I wouldn’t make it. I was pinned down by sniper fire.” It was her boldest bid to turn the page on the controversy over her claim that she had been forced to land in Bosnia in 1996 under sniper fire. After being broadsided by 11 consecutive losses in February, Clinton headed over to the youth-oriented Saturday Night Live, on NBC to joke with timing worthy of Woody Allen: “Oh, the campaign is going very well, very very well” — then adding with a deadpan expression, “why, what have you heard?”
Republican John McCain, known to wheel out his sarcastic wit on the campaign trail, seems to have found a late-night format that works for him on David Letterman, on CBS. McCain announced his candidacy there in February 2007: joking that everyone could just go ahead and play the presidential anthem “Hail To The Chief” for him. On cable television, McCain also is a fan of Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, who is not known to go easy on conservatives. Barack Obama, who also stopped in on Jon Stewart’s “the Daily Show” almost a year ago, observed on CBS that: “Jon is able to see through a lot of the silliness of the campaign season. And, Obama said, “you get a different audience,” not the same people who necessarily watch an evening news broadcast.
In 2004, the Pew Research Center revealed the eye-opening figure that eight percent of Americans — and 21 percent of those under 30 — got their information about what is happening in the world from not from the traditional news broadcasts, but from comedy shows. A similar survey last January, taken when writers were on strike, still found that eight percent of Americans followed the campaign through comedy shows. The presidential campaign has been a generous source of humor, carefully tracked by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA): from January 1 to March 15, Hillary Clinton was the butt of 174 jokes, John McCain 140 and Barack Obama 103.