Obama, aides took unusual steps to cultivate ‘Daily Show’ comic.
By Darren Samuelsohn, Politico
Jon Stewart slipped unnoticed into the White House in the midst of the October 2011 budget fight, summoned to an Oval Office coffee with President Barack Obama that he jokingly told his escort felt like being called into the principal’s office.
In February 2014, Obama again requested Stewart make the trip from Manhattan to the White House, this time for a midmorning visit hours before the president would go before television cameras to warn Russia that “there will be costs” if it made any further military intervention in Ukraine.
To engage privately with the president in his inner sanctum at two sensitive moments — previously unreported meetings that are listed in the White House visitor logs and confirmed to POLITICO by three former Obama aides — speaks volumes about Stewart and his reach, which goes well beyond the million or so viewers who tune in to “The Daily Show” on most weeknights.
Love Stewart’s jokes or hate them, he has proven to be a unique voice who is capable of turning in-the-weeds policy discussions into viral video sensations that the country is still talking about the next morning.
As the White House recognized, Stewart can, at times, be a more potent influence on policy than Obama himself. The 52-year-old funnyman is widely credited with changing how the government treated military veterans and Sept. 11 first responders and for the cancellation of a hyperpartisan CNN talk show. His broadsides against President George W. Bush’s Iraq War and a series of Obama missteps had a searing effect on how Americans thought about Washington.
Top Obama aides David Axelrod and Austan Goolsbee knew Stewart’s voice mattered and made sure to field calls and emails from the host and “Daily Show” staff.
Looking back on Stewart’s 16-year run, which ends with a final show next Thursday, Democratic and Republican officials, including many of the lawmakers and administration aides he’s routinely skewered, said in interviews there are plenty of identifiable marks where Stewart has made a difference.
“I’d be hard-pressed to think of a person who spoke with the same amount of authority to that big of a group of people,” said Eric Lesser, a former Obama White House aide now serving in the Massachusetts state Senate. Reminded that he had once worked for the president of the United States, Lesser quickly added this caveat: “People in media.”
• • •
Stewart rose to prominence just as the stature of network news anchors faded. With the departure of Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, a new generation of news consumers turned to Stewart for his satire and commentary, and in the process got schooled on the headlines of the day.
Even though his live TV audience averages around 1.3 million — a mix of liberal, educated viewers including the hard-to-reach 18- to 34-year-old males — Comedy Central’s searchable archive system also helped the cause because every segment can live on the Web.
“He’s a modern-day Will Rogers and Mark Twain,” Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a frequent Republican guest on Stewart’s show, said in an interview.
Stewart’s tearful opening monologue nine days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, effectively served as the opening salvo of an ongoing crusade for firefighters, police officers and other people who came to the World Trade Center site “literally with buckets, rebuilding.”
Nearly a decade later, Stewart invited four of those responders, sick with a variety of serious ailments, to explain their health situations. Their graphic discussion helped break a legislative logjam in the Senate by shaming Republicans who at the time were filibustering a bill that would provide billions in health benefits and compensation to the 9/11 responders who had become ill after their work at ground zero. Congress passed the legislation three days after Stewart’s show.
“What took us eight years of walking the halls of Congress, Jon Stewart in 22 minutes literally moved mountains and gave us a heartbeat again when we were flat-lined,” said John Feal, an Army veteran and post-9/11 cleanup worker.
In March 2009, Stewart discussed the new Obama administration’s idea of removing veterans with private insurance plans from the Department of Veterans Affairs rolls. “That can’t be right,” he intoned. The White House scrapped the plan one day after his segment aired, and veterans’ advocates recall Stewart’s commentary being discussed during a West Wing meeting with senior aides including then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
Other examples of Stewart crusading for the vets include a May 2014 bit lampooning VA Secretary Eric Shinseki for giving mild-mannered answers to Congress about an epic backlog in medical disability claims. He diagnosed Shinseki and others in the administration as having “PBSD: post bureaucratic stress disorder.”
“I don’t think there’s been a single person in the media who’s more strongly influenced the support of veterans’ policies than Jon Stewart,” said Paul Rieckhoff, founder and CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
Stewart’s successes extend into simple public discourse, too, most notably with an October 2004 guest appearance on CNN’s “Crossfire” that helped change the lineup for daytime cable television talk shows. In a live segment, Stewart pleaded with co-hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala to “stop hurting America” with their partisan bickering. Three months later, citing Stewart’s comments, CNN canceled the show and ended its relationship with Carlson.
“I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise,” CNN President Jonathan Klein said at the time, according to a report from The New York Times.
Last month, Stewart had another straight-to-the-camera moment, channeling his disgust over what he said would be a “we won’t do jack s—t” national response to the gun rampage in Charleston, South Carolina, that left nine African-Americans dead.
“The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina, and the roads are named for Confederate generals,” Stewart said near the end of his nearly six-minute monologue. “And the white guy is the one who feels like his country is being taken away from him.”
Many credit Stewart with helping set the tone for the sweeping national debate about the appropriateness of flying the Confederate flag, and its eventual removal from the South Carolina state Capitol.
“Whether it’s guns or on the VA or anything like that, he tried to reflect back, I think, a national sentiment or national mood to policymakers, and he did it sometimes poignantly, and he did it other times very harshly, with very harsh words and biting humor, but the idea is, ‘I need you to pay attention to this, and I need you to do something better,’” said Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chairman.
Former Vice President Al Gore gushed over Stewart’s successes because of his commitment to explaining global warming science.
“At a time when many traditional news outlets shied away from clearly reporting the urgency of the climate crisis, Jon consistently cut through the absurdity of climate denial night after night,” Gore said in an email.
In a rare interview, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), the former writer and actor on “Saturday Night Live,” said Stewart “made the platform” for serious satiric television news shows. “None of this makes any difference if he’s not hugely talented,” he said. “He’s not only got talent. He’s got a great work ethic. He’s very intelligent. And he has integrity.”
While Stewart’s politics are seen by many as center-left, he also has a populist streak heavy on fiscal responsibility, good government and fighting for the little guy. “He doesn’t have a permanent allegiance to the Democratic Party by any means,” said Goolsbee, the former Obama White House chief economic adviser. “But he struck me as he’s got a progressive approach and like a low tolerance for bull—-t slash spin, which Washington is full of.”
Republicans caution that Stewart is no easy-to-pigeonhole liberal, either.
“That’s just too easy,” said Steele, who Stewart mocked in a memorable segment by creating the RNC chairman’s likeness as a blue puppet. “It’s a throwaway. If you go down that road you miss the impact if not the importance that he has had on political dialogue in this country, that he’s had on policymakers.”
Steele explained that while on the road he would often hear from college Republicans asking whether he had seen a Stewart clip, and that forced him to rethink GOP positions on a range of issues, from student debt and the job market for college graduates to same-sex marriage.
“I certainly in my efforts to expand the reach of the party made note of the fact there were things that were brought up and talked about on his show that we weren’t focused on that we should take a look at,” Steele said.
Ann Ravel, chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, said Stewart and his former Comedy Central colleague Stephen Colbert didn’t spark any obvious changes in campaign finance policy when they set up a super PAC during the 2012 presidential election to lampoon the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision giving corporations free-speech rights to spend unlimited amounts of money in political campaigns. But, she said, the two comedians got the country talking about esoteric campaign finance policies.
“They raised the issue to the American public in a way that no one has ever done,” she said.
Stewart, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has repeatedly downplayed his influence. When Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) appeared on “The Daily Show” in January 2011 thanking Stewart for what his 9/11 first-responders segment had done to break the legislative gridlock, he replied, “Well, that’s the thing that’s crazy. The idea that something has to be on television to mean anything is what’s so crazy. … I do feel like we drove by a burning car on a highway and went ‘Uh, someone should call that in.’”
• • •
Late-night TV is usually the stuff of one-liners and celebrities, movie and music plugs that help Americans fall asleep. Stewart invented a different approach, with pained attempts to explain the ins and outs of a cap-and-trade bill to curb carbon emissions and frequent reminders during the Bush years that the fighting in Iraq — and the search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction — weren’t going so well.
Stewart’s comic progeny will carry the torch: “Daily Show” alumnus Colbert takes over for David Letterman on CBS this fall; John Oliver has dedicated lengthy segments of his HBO program to complicated topics like net neutrality, predatory lending and chicken farming; Larry Wilmore engages panelists on the news of the day in Colbert’s old 11:30 p.m. time slot. South African comic Trevor Noah takes over “The Daily Show” later this year.
But do any of the above equate to Stewart?
“I’ll tell you, some Democrats are worried,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who says she was motivated to write her first book with the hope of being a guest on his show — only to find out it’s coming out five days after Stewart goes off the air. “He’s done a great thing for us reminding young people why the Republican Party is out of step.”
Conservatives like Sen. Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican and climate change skeptic, dismiss Stewart as a shill for Obama and the left.
“I’ve never seen him,” said Inhofe, who recently was the butt of “Daily Show” jokes for throwing a snowball on the Senate floor to demonstrate that man-made climate change isn’t real. “There’s a lot of liberal press I just don’t pay attention to.”
Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said he doesn’t buy into the premise that Stewart’s work has helped clean up the VA. “With all due respect to Mr. Stewart, the VFW over the past year testified before Congress like 30 times,” he said. “I don’t remember him providing any expert testimony at the witness table.”
McCain, for his part, said he thinks “The Daily Show” “had an effect in a more indirect way, but [it] certainly had an effect.”
“He talked to young people. Young people watch him. Young people vote,” McCain said. “So I don’t think that there’s any doubt that with his comedy” — the senator smiled and held up two fingers like quotation marks as he said “comedy” — “that he had an effect on the workings of government.”
• • •
And, quite often, that effect took the form of either prodding, or working in concert with, the Obama administration.
In Stewart’s first show after his February 2014 visit to the White House, he picked up on the Russia-Ukraine news that Obama had spoken about in the press briefing room a few hours after their private chat. In a segment titled “It’s a Vlad, Vlad, Vlad, Vlad World,” Stewart giggled as he displayed a picture of the shirtless Russian leader — “Heil Titler,” he joked. Then he showed a video of Vladimir Putin at the Winter Olympics in Sochi and wondered if he was “even paying attention at the Olympics? … Or did you consider the parade of nations a browsing opportunity?”
Obama White House officials enjoyed it when Stewart was singing from the same hymnal. But they also were quick to pay attention when he turned against them.
“He’s an expert shamer,” said Dag Vega, a former White House staffer who was in charge of booking the president and other administration officials onto “The Daily Show.”
Axelrod, a frequent Stewart guest, kept in touch with the host by phone and email. In an interview, Axelrod said Stewart was “a useful prod” for the administration.
“I can’t say that because Jon Stewart was unhappy policy changed. But I can say that he had forceful arguments, they were arguments that we knew would be heard and deserved to be answered,” Axelrod said.
Goolsbee said he would often wince at Stewart’s assaults on the Obama White House and Capitol Hill Democrats. He recalled one particularly tough January 2010 episode in which Stewart used a clip from the 1980s TV show “The Wonder Years” to question why Democrats ever expected Republicans to negotiate in good faith on issues from climate change to taxes to financial reform. “You’re just cringing,” Goolsbee said. “Oh God. I think the main thing that you’re hoping is, you’re hoping in your heart of hearts he’s not right.”
Like Axelrod, Goolsbee acknowledged he would stay in touch with the “Daily Show” staff: He emailed with his former Yale classmate and improv comedy partner Steve Bodow, who joined “The Daily Show” as a writer in 2002 and now is an executive producer.
That work-the-umps strategy also involved the president, who used his two Oval Office meetings with Stewart as a chance to sell the administration’s ideas. At the 2011 sit-down, Goolsbee said, the president wanted to counter his critics on the left and lay the groundwork for his 2012 reelection campaign.
“The White House itself was quite interested in at least explaining its side of the story to Jon Stewart,” Goolsbee said, “up to and including the president.”
Obama ultimately appeared seven times on Stewart’s show — in their last joint appearance earlier this month, the president joked that he would issue an executive order to keep the host on the air. “I can’t believe you’re leaving before me,” Obama said.
VIDEO
