Late-night's not always a laugher for candidates
There was no time for banter, or anything vaguely resembling a joke. David Letterman, serious TV interlocutor, got right to business Thursday night with retired Army General Wesley K. Clark. Letterman wanted to know about bullet wounds, the Kosovo campaign, rebuilding Iraq. He resurrected some of Clark's early campaign woes. He barely cracked a smile.
By the time it ended, Clark had taken up 18 coveted minutes of late-night TV. But it wasn't exactly rip-roaring fun.
It's one of the new wrinkles in this era of politicians-as-entertainment and entertainment-as-news. A late-night appearance seemed odd when Bill Clinton played his saxophone for Arsenio Hall in 1992. But now, most presidential campaigns consider late-night a standard part of the TV gantlet, a chance to humanize a candidate and reach a broad swath of the country.
Still, campaigns have also come to see a clear distinction between an appearance on "Late Night With David Letterman" and a slot on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno."
"Letterman is the Tim Russert of the talk shows. He's the actual test," one Democratic insider says. "On Leno, you can go on and do your bit. Whereas on Letterman, he isn't afraid to ask you legitimately tough questions. He'll do his part to trip you up."
Letterman has done his best to hone that reputation in this new, semiserious phase of his career. His somber post-Sept. 11 interviews made him a sort of national catharsis machine. And his 2000 interview with Republican nominee George W. Bush -- in which he grilled the candidate on the death penalty and the air quality in Texas -- gave him a measure of infamy in the political world.
The Bush interview was "deadly," the equivalent of a harsh grilling on a Sunday news show, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "It is a very, very effective piece of journalism."
A Leno appearance, by contrast, is seen as a chance for shtick -- a place where John F. Kerry sharpened his man-of-the-people chops by riding a motorcycle onstage on Nov. 11. A Kerry adviser says that the Harley spin was the Leno writers' idea and that the show wanted Kerry on for Veterans Day, all good for his campaign message.
But the visit proved that Leno can be devastating, too. Because Kerry, it turned out, was the second-billed guest, following a cigar-chomping, trash-talking puppet named Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. And the dog, voiced by comedian Robert Smigel, delivered a sharper critique of Kerry than any rival is likely to muster. His humor tends to center on dog waste, and this time he compared it to the Kerry campaign's momentum.
If things go poorly for Kerry, that could become the campaign's defining moment, said Matthew T. Felling, media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C. "Michael Dukakis had the tank picture," Felling said, "and Kerry's going to have Triumph."
It proves, analysts say, that campaigns must plan their late-night appearances carefully: Demand to be the first guest, know who else is on the bill, avoid going anywhere near the likes of Triumph and pugnacious filmmaker Michael Moore.
Leno should be given particular pause these days, Felling said, since he gave Arnold Schwarzenegger such glowing treatment at the start and finish of his gubernatorial bid.
Triumph, it turns out, had a riff on that one, too. "The Terminator can take over the show, but John Kerry, a war veteran, has to follow a freaking dog puppet?" he said on the Leno show. "What's going on in America?"
Letterman isn't averse to poking fun at politicians either. And campaigns tend to comply, since they know self-deprecating humor can be endearing. In May, Senator Joe Lieberman, who had just announced his presidential bid, came on the air to read a Top Ten list. There were complex negotiations over the wording, a Lieberman aide said, but the results were suitably goofy: Number one was "Look at me. Do you honestly think there'll be a sex scandal?"
And Clark, the first candidate this year to be a full-fledged Letterman guest, went on after the "Top Ten Perks of Being a Playboy Playmate" (number one: "I bought a house with the money I saved on pants") and the guy who hoped to break a world record by balancing beer glasses on his chin.
But Clark was also the lead guest. The interview spanned two commercial breaks. And it was clear that Letterman wished he could do more.
"We have very little time, sadly, and I have three questions I want to ask you," he told Clark at one point. Granted, this was not, on balance, the world's toughest grilling. Letterman referred to Clark as "sir," asked mostly friendly questions, and gave Clark a free pass on broad assertions.
All in all, it was a triumph of sorts for the Clark campaign, the equivalent of a very long biographical ad. But it also was absent the expected hallmarks of late-night TV: the chance, as Felling puts it, to take the candidates off pedestals and put them on barstools. Was it journalism? Maybe. But on balance, the dog puppet managed to generate more news.
Joanna Weiss can be reached at jweiss@globe.com.
