Letterman, Obama both seem off their game
What could seem better than getting David Letterman and former President Barack Obama together again and sitting them down in front of an audience to talk for an hour about whatever’s been on their minds since they both left their old jobs? What better fantasy come true for anyone who misses both men terribly?
Unfortunately, Letterman’s new show for Netflix, a sixepisode series called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” fails to deliver on its promise, falling flat in its debut. Letterman, who retired so elegantly in 2015, seems only half-engaged here and far too much in the thrall of his first guest, who left office a year ago and has avoided the talk-show circuit until now.
Both men seem rusty at the art of banter. They’re off their game. The interview doesn’t produce any surprising or newsworthy statements from Obama. Instead, Letterman asks Obama to talk about his upbringing, his mother, his reckoning with his own identity — well-trod territory, retold as if viewers have never heard of this person named Barack Obama.
The discussion meanders along the surface, touching on Russian interference in U.S. elections and the state of discourse in American society — though never deeply. “One of the biggest challenges we have to our democracy is the degree to which we don’t share a common baseline of facts,” Obama says. “What the Russians exploited, (was) already here — we are operating in completely different information universes. If you watch Fox News, you are living on a different planet than you are if you listen to NPR.”
Obama describes his disappointment that social media, which was so key to his 2008 and 2012 victories, has become a carefully calibrated weapon.
“I had a very optimistic feeling about (social networks),” Obama says. “What we missed was the degree to which people who are in power — special interests, foreign governments, et cetera, can in fact manipulate that and ...”
“Propagandize,” Letterman offers. “Propagandize,” Obama says. “I was under the impression that Twitter would be the mechanism by which truth was told around the world,” Letterman says in his trademark deadpan.
The interview offers few direct jabs taken at the current president, probably because Obama’s too smart to take the bait and Letterman’s too reluctant to offer it. There are also lots of jokes about both men being quote-unquote unemployed. “You’re hang gliding, you’re climbing volcanoes, you’re wrestling sharks,” Letterman observes. “I’m at Bed Bath & Beyond picking out wire hangers.”
Free to be whatever he wants in front of the camera now, Letterman opts for befuddled pussycat rather than old lion. He fawns over the former president for most of the hour, reaching a climax near the end (after a plug for Obama’s foundation and library), when he says, “When I was a kid, and it’s still taught today, irrespective of the man or woman who holds the office, you have to respect the office of president. Without a question of a doubt, you are the first president I truly and fully respect.”