I mentioned a few items back that last night's Late Show With David Letterman was taped on Monday. It was...but I have since learned from someone who was in the audience that a few chunks of Friday's show were retaped on Thursday following the taping of that evening's episode.
Also: The decision to tape next Friday's show on Friday is apparently because the Vice-Presidential Debate is on Thursday. They feel Dave needs to be able to comment on it. After that, they'll probably go back to taping Friday's show on Monday, which I still think is a mistake.
This is...uh, well, I'm not sure how I'd categorize it. The other night on his show, Conan O'Brien did a joke about trains colliding. The joke was not seen in Los Angeles, where we recently had a nasty train collision. When they came to that moment in L.A., the local station did a news cut-in and explained that they weren't showing us Conan's joke about a train collision. You can see how it looked on screens all across Los Angeles here. I'm not sure how I feel about this.
I'm completely puzzled by this matter of McCain cancelling on Letterman and then doing an interview with Katie Couric. Joe Scarborough said on Morning Joe that the video Dave showed of McCain being made up to do Kouric's show was not live but was old tape from six hours earlier. I haven't heard that any other place. What do you think of McCain's decision to bail on Letterman? What are the ethics in a situation like that?
Well, the ethical thing to do is to show up and honor your commitment. If there's a reason not to, the ethical thing is to be utterly honest. If McCain had called Dave and said, "I'm sorry but I think it would be inappropriate for me to be on a comedy show today so I'm going to do an interview with Katie Couric instead," Letterman might still have been angry but it wouldn't have been due to what was apparently a lie. I say "apparently" because we didn't hear the Letterman-McCain phone conversation and can only go by Dave's report on what was said. He claimed McCain insisted he had to fly right back to Washington...and then the Senator stayed in New York to do the CBS interview and, the next day, to address the Clinton Global Initiative over at the Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan.
Scarborough was wrong. It was a live internal network feed, as proven by the quotes coming out from CBS folks who are ticked off that Dave used it in his show. (As far as I know, no network has any rule about this...but they may institute one now.) You wonder what would have happened if Letterman had grabbed up the phone and at least tried to phone Katie Couric's studio at that moment. Maybe he wouldn't have gotten through to McCain or even to Couric but I bet it would have been amusing if he'd just been turned away by some CBS operator as he told her, "But you don't understand! John McCain told me he had to race to the airport and fly back to Washington..."
Letterman tapes at 4:30 in the afternoon. The cancellation from McCain came between 3:00 and 3:30, which is very tight. Over on a Dave newsgroup, Don Giller (probably the world's foremost authority on Letterman) reports that at the time, he was in Rupert's Deli, the little sandwich shop around the corner from Dave's studio that figures into so many remotes. According to Don, "[Rupert] told me that secret service had instructed him to close his shop early, so he sent his workers home. Just minutes before, he had just learned that McCain had cancelled, so he had lost a lot of business."
It would be interesting to know if Keith Olbermann was their first choice as a last-minute fill-in. Every show like that has a little list of people who are nearby and friendly and who can be called upon in an emergency. In the past, I believe Letterman's #1 go-to guy has been Regis Philbin. They may have called Olbermann first on this one because Dave wanted to spend the segment bitching about McCain so he needed someone who would join him in his disdain for the Senator. Chandra Wilson was also added as a guest. (The McCain interview had been scheduled to take up most of the show.)
Incidentally, this whole episode points up one of the weaknesses I think Letterman has had in his show for some time. He's been taping his Friday episodes on Mondays so he can't address current events on them. A lot of folks probably tuned in last night to hear him continue his McCain bashing...but not a word, of course, was said. I'm hearing that this is not going to happen next week; that Dave is going to back to taping Friday's show on Friday, at least for a while.
Here's a famous (and apparently, effective) commercial that ran in 1952 for Dwight D. Eisenhower. Can we imagine a candidate using a spot like this today?
The McCain folks have a new ad out today filled with clips of all the times Obama said, "I agree with John" and "My friend John is right." Exactly how do they think that helps their guy? What I think most swing voters will take away from that is that Obama is gracious and that on some points, the two men are in agreement. Shouldn't McCain's selling points have something to do with where they think Obama doesn't "get it?"
Seriously. Not that I mind one bit when McCain has an ineffective ad up...but I'm generally baffled as to what they're thinking. McCain is starting to remind me of that nutty dictator in the Woody Allen film Bananas who starts announcing that all underwear must be worn on the outside and all children under the age of sixteen are now sixteen...
An e-mail this morning writes, "Eager to see the stories you'll have about Paul Newman." Wish I had one for you. I never met the man and somehow never even saw a majority of what they say were his best films. What I did see I liked, of course. I guess I was most impressed by the fact that opinions on Newman were so close to unanimous: Everyone admired him as both an actor and a philanthropist. I've heard "bad" stories about almost all the major stars misbehaving on the set or treating others poorly. Not Paul Newman. He leaves behind a legacy of good movies, good food products and good feelings. You can't do much better than that.
Fred Kaplan reviews the debate and gives high marks to Obama. Kaplan does mention a few points where I thought Obama could have and should have hit back a lot harder than he did. There should have been a moment when in speaking of Iraq, he said something like, "I'm sorry you don't like my timetable idea, Senator...but everyone else, including the Iraqi leadership and much of the Bush administration, has decided that's the way to go."
As you all know, I'm for Obama and I think McCain would be a disaster. So it feels a little weird for me to say that I don't think Obama did as well as some of the polls this morning say he did. McCain, I thought, did much to counteract the evolving portrait of him as a reckless drama queen. He looked more "presidential" at that podium than he has for a long time. On reflection, I thought it was closer to a tie than the polls say — not that I'm complaining. And I guess in this case, a tie would be a win for Obama since Foreign Policy was supposed to be McCain's strong suit and since McCain is the one who needed to land a knockout blow and didn't.
So...what excuse are they going to come up with when they try to cancel the Vice-Presidential Debate? The McCain people wouldn't even let Sarah Palin go on the news, as Joe Biden did, to spin for the top of the ticket. That kind of thing is doing more damage to Governor Palin's credibility as a candidate than anything the Democrats are saying about her.
September 28, 2008
