As Obama accepts offers, late-night TV longs for Romney
The week after the first presidential debate, with Mitt Romney riding a surge in the polls, Lorne Michaels believed he was close to achieving one of the perennial objectives of an election year for the celebrated television show he created and still produces, Saturday Night Live. Landing a presidential nominee as a guest. The excitement at the show about a possible walkon by Romney was tangible. But sometime that Friday, interest from the Romney camp cooled; the Republican candidate did not follow the precedent set in other recent presidential races by John McCain and George W. Bush by appearing on television’s most famous address for political satire.
A deal with the Romney camp has not been as close since, though Michaels said he is keeping offers open to both campaigns for a last-second appearance. That happened four years ago when McCain appeared as a guest three days before Election Day, performing a memorable sketch with Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, spoofing a home shopping appearance in a late appeal for cash.
Michaels is hardly alone in his pursuit: Every other late-night television producer has been chasing Romney for weeks to try to secure a guest appearance, with no success so far. Romney also has declined invitations from a host of other media outlets who have landed President Barack Obama for interviews, including MTV and NBC News, which was given two days of access to the president during his campaign tour last week.
EXTENDED APPEARANCES
The opposite has been true for Obama, who has taken advantage of the open invitation from the late-night shows to make extended guest appearances on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show on Comedy Central, and Jay Leno’s Tonight Show on NBC, racking up strong ratings in each case. (Michelle Obama visited Jimmy Kimmel on ABC.) Obama visited David Letterman on CBS last month and did a sketch, Slow Jammin’ the News, with NBC’s Jimmy Fallon in April.
In the waning days of an intensely close election, one campaign has clearly made a calculation that the latenight audience is valuable and worth courting, while the other has maintained late-night silence.
Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, said the willingness to appear with interviewers like Stewart, Leno and Letterman has to do with reaching out in less conventional ways to undecided voters.
“Most regular viewers of the news made up their minds a long time ago,” LaBolt said in an e-mail. “So while the president has continued to do interviews in traditional news venues, our goal in the final days of the race must be to reach voters where they are — whether that’s crisscrossing the country asking for their vote or appearing on the programs they tune into on a daily basis.”
Appearing with Stewart had the benefit of playing to an especially concentrated group of younger adults. The Daily Show scores the best ratings in late night among the 18- to 49-year-old viewers so valuable in television. Those viewers are hard to reach on news programs. (Obama’s appearance drew the biggest audience on The Daily Show this year, 2.8 million.)
Stewart’s network, Comedy Central, coincidentally released a research study this month that asked millennials in what venue they would most like to hear a candidate be interviewed. By a large margin they responded: on a late-night comedy show.
LETTERMAN’S CAMPAIGN
Letterman has been in the middle of the late-night story this election season because of Romney’s comments in a fundraising tape where he criticized 47 percent of U.S. citizens for not taking personal responsibility. He also said Letterman “hates me.”
Since then Letterman has waged an on-camera campaign to get Romney onto his visitors’ couch, at one point even telling his viewers not to vote for the Republican unless he turned up. He hasn’t.
“Not exactly sure what the problem is,” said Rob Burnett, Letterman’s executive producer. “If they need us to send a car, we can do that.”
Much of the back and forth between Letterman and the Romney camp has been in that joking tone, but Burnett, like several other late-night producers, suggested that Romney’s avoidance of late-night shows (he did appear with Leno in March) is no accident of scheduling conflicts.
“I have to believe every decision being made is strategic,” Burnett said. “They have never told us that Gov. Romney won’t do the show, but it’s becoming pretty obvious that he has no intentions of coming.”
“It’s obviously something they have discussed behind closed doors and they have their own strategies,” said Hillary Kun, the supervising producer for The Daily Show, who books all the guests. “It’s hard to really know what’s going on there.”
Spokesmen for the Romney campaign did not respond to several requests for comment. Romney, in the 47 percent video, did comment on why he has turned down Saturday Night Live in the past.
“I did not do that in part because you want to show that you’re fun and you’re a good person, but you also want to be presidential. And Saturday Night Live has the potential of looking slapstick and not presidential.”