Getting His Dignity Back: The Daily Beast
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 11:26AM Anyone wanting to write about Obama’s second one hundred days in office might call the account “From Leno to Letterman: A Presidential Odyssey.” Obama’s performance on Leno’s old Tonight Show six months ago couldn’t have been more different from his appearance on Letterman last night.
On Leno, Obama was self-deprecating and almost boyish, telling stories as if looking at himself from outside the “bubble,” as he charmingly called it—anecdotes about being followed by a doctor with a defibrillator, about Secret Service men who wouldn’t let him walk alone for “750 yards,” and so forth. Without sacrificing the dignity of his new office, he bent it toward ordinary life. He bantered with Leno, even seeming to have a turn at playing comedian himself.
But last night on Letterman, for all his smiles and seeming bonhomie and that bit of business about the heart-shaped potato—if only the heartland would embrace him like that! you felt he was thinking—the president wasn’t about to play along with the comedy. In reply to Letterman’s (uncharacteristically) earnest question about the bitter opposition to his proposals for health-care reform, Obama said, almost as an admonition to his host: “That’s why I end up having to be on the David Letterman Show.”
That is to say, Obama’s goal last night was to cast the recent town-hall and tea-party turbulence as tired summer reruns of historical American opposition to change. . . . more
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