David Letterman and the 2008 election

For some reason I can’t really understand, my wife decided to watch Game Change a couple of days ago. She’s already seen the movie, and I’m not really sure what put her in the mood to watch it again, but she doesn’t understand why I watch The Godfather every time it’s on TV, so whatever. Because our daughter monopolizes one of the two TVs in the house when she’s home, and the other TV is in our one-degree-cooler-than-the-rest-of-the-house-and-therefore-apparently-uninhabitable family room, she streams a lot of stuff on her iPhone, and inevitably I wind up watching some of it with her. Unlike her, I’ve never seen Game Change all the way through (it seems like a fine movie, I guess, but I lose interest after a while), and you’d have to pay me to get me to read anything by Mark Halperin, so needless to say I haven’t read the book.

Anyway, I know the movie (and I guess a big chunk of the book, I don’t know) focuses on McCain picking Palin as the turning point in the campaign, seemingly to McCain’s benefit at first but really to his great detriment. I assume anybody could come away from watching the movie and conclude that it was the Palin pick that ultimately sunk a campaign that was playing catch up to Obama from the beginning, and to some degree I guess that’s true. However, and not to defend Palin in any way, but I’ve always felt that McCain sunk his own campaign when, right after the economic crisis, he went through what can best be described as a public conniption fit. Now, to be fair, polls said that McCain had already started to lose the momentum he had coming out of the Republican Convention, and he was always going to take more heat for the financial collapse because he was the nominee of the incumbent party, but look at what happened. The country fell into a financial panic with a little over a month left in the campaign, and it was presented with the choice between one candidate who looked panicked and overwhelmed, to the point where he wanted to “suspend” the campaign, whatever that means, and another candidate who said “hey, a president has to be able to do more than one thing at a time.” That was the end of the competitive phase of the campaign.

So on David Letterman’s last day as a full-time television personality, and in a craven attempt at pure clickbait, I thought it might be appropriate to remember the role that he personally played in turning McCain’s reaction to the economic crisis from “disconcerting” to “public joke.” McCain was supposed to be on The Late Show on September 24, but earlier in the day it looked like a planned bailout was falling apart in Congress and McCain canceled his Letterman appearance at the last minute to “return to Washington” and work on finding a solution. Letterman was less than impressed with this move, and he spent most of his show letting his viewers know about it (he even brought Keith Olbermann on as McCain’s emergency fill-in just to amp things up a little). Then he found out that McCain hadn’t gone back to DC, but was being interviewed by Katie Couric for the CBS Evening News at the very moment Letterman was taping his show. It got ugly:

We shouldn’t overestimate the influence that a guy like David Letterman has, not just on his own audience but on how the media covers things and the much wider audience that consumes that media, but we shouldn’t underestimate it either. I think it’s fair to say that Letterman had a non-trivial impact on the course of that race.