Tag Archives: obama

Leno vs. Conan

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I find this Conan O’Brien vs. NBC thing so riveting, especially now that Conan has released a statement saying he won’t do The Tonight Show if it airs at 12:05. Oh my god! Drama!! What’s gonna happen?

Seriously, I do think it’s riveting. Jeff Zucker has really driven NBC into the ground. When I was a kid, NBC was the network to watch. My parents watched The Today Show with Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley every morning while having breakfast or getting ready for work. At night, NBC had all the great sitcoms that kids my age enjoyed: Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, Silver Spoons, Gimme a Break, even Punky Brewster. On Saturday mornings it had the Smurfs. When I was an adolescent, I would watch Days of our Lives and Santa Barbara. As I got a little older, NBC had Family Ties, and then The Cosby Show, and then Friends and Seinfeld. Even today, it has some great comedies on Thursdays: 30 Rock and The Office. And we watch Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News every night.

I used to feel this weird loyalty to NBC, even though it was just a TV network. I felt like the three networks had personas. Even though I watched some CBS and ABC shows, watching CBS and ABC felt like going over to a friend’s house where everything seemed slightly off. NBC just seemed like the network that had everything I liked.

But Jeff Zucker has ruined NBC: first the horrible but cheap-to-produce reality shows, and then this debacle of Jay Leno at 10 p.m. Moving Leno to 10 p.m. was a risk, and while it’s true that if you don’t take risks, you don’t get anywhere, you also don’t mess with something on TV that works. Zucker messed with something that worked. Jay Leno at 10 p.m. is New Coke.

On the rare occasions when I’ve watched Leno on TV, I’ve found him annoying and boring. But for whatever reason, lots of people like him — as long as he’s on at 11:35 and not at 10. You can make fun of the public for liking him, but really, what’s the point? Many people like things that I don’t, and vice versa.

And I have to admit, I watched Leno’s final Tonight show last May and was entertained. He did a “best of” compilation of those idiots on the street who don’t know the answers to questions, and it was pretty funny.

But these days I’m generally ready to go to sleep by the time I finish watching the first half of The Daily Show. And you know what? Once you get used to watching Jon Stewart every night, it’s really weird to watch the old-fashioned host-striding-out-and-doing-jokes-before-an-audience thing. Even if the host is Conan O’Brien, and even if the jokes are funny.

Oh, and as for David Letterman? He’s not always easy to watch, and I don’t always get or like his humor, but I admire him deeply and I’m in awe of his talents. I guess it has something to do with this terrific profile of him from last September, when he was caught up in his sex scandal. An excerpt:

Craggy, bewildered, irascible Dave, with his gray crew cut, designer suits, and white socks — a nightly mind-blowing image in HDTV — has become a persona, a distinctive agglomeration of character traits, even more than his idol Johnny Carson, much more like Carson’s own idol, Jack Benny. His monologues are indifferent as one-liners and jokes, but the character who delivers them is one memorable American. He can reel off dozens of Obama jokes and McCain jokes and Paris Hilton jokes, but it is when Letterman begins to invert and mutter, when his personal neuroses and raw wounds are inflamed by the assaults of everyday life— and whose aren’t? — that is when he becomes something more than a good comedian and something like the scarred protagonist of his own comic novel — a bewildered, gutty mid-lifer at the crash intersection of American culture.

As for Conan O’Brien — he’ll be okay. He’s rolling in dough no matter what happens. Maybe he’ll go to Fox. Maybe NBC will cave in and put Jay somewhere else (doubtful).

The network has treated him like shit, but that’s showbiz.

Global Competitiveness?

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This op-ed about American decline by the Times’s token conservative, Ross Douthat, bothers me — particularly this part:

[I]nstead of seeking a new post-Reagan consensus, the Obama Democrats are returning to their party’s long-running pursuit of European-style social democracy — by micromanaging industry, pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs, and binding the economy in a web of new taxes and regulations.

These policies may help smooth over the inequalities that have opened in our national life since the 1970s. But they threaten to cost America its position in the world along the way.

Social democracy has its benefits, but global competitiveness isn’t one of them.

Is he seriously arguing that America’s “position in the world,” its “global competitiveness,” is more important than the well-being of our citizens? Pundits are always saying that it’s deathly important that we not let other countries get ahead of us, without explaining why we should care. Is it really so crucial that we be Number One in the world? What’s wrong with just being happy?

Why do these people have to make everything a competition?

I seriously wonder whether I’m missing something, because I just don’t get it.

Health Care

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Health care reform has me dejected, but this bill needs to pass. We can’t “kill the bill.”

I’m annoyed at Obama for not risking political capital to fight for what he believes in. More importantly, I have nothing but contempt for Harry Reid. I blame Reid for this fiasco more than Obama. If not for this ridiculous notion that any bill needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, we would have a much better health care bill today. The idea that Democrats are being allowed to threaten to filibuster their own party’s legislation is absurd. Are you kidding me? The way I see it: you want to filibuster your own party’s legislation? You want to pull that kind of shit? Fine, then you’re getting stripped of all your committee chairmanships and any other special perks you get from being a member of the majority party. I’d rather have 53 Democratic senators led by the ass-kicking Lyndon Johnson than a 60-member majority led by Harry Reid, that milquetoast fuckwad. Any time Reid opens his mouth I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him awake. He practically whispers in front of the microphone. He barely looks at the camera. He’d lose a fight against a ham sandwich. You could run him over with a tricycle. The guy has less charisma than John Kerry. He has negative charisma.

Fortunately, he’s up for re-election next year and he’ll probably lose. Since it’s unlikely the Democrats will lose their majority next year, we’ll probably have a new Democratic majority leader in the next Congress. But by that point it will be too late to put together a better health care plan.

Which is why, as disappointed I am in the Senate bill as it now stands, I’m more annoyed with people on the left who say we need to “kill the bill.” If we don’t pass a bill now, we won’t have this chance for another 15-20 years. And there are some great things in this bill. For starters, under this bill, 30 million more Americans will have health insurance. Some people on the left are saying that because there’s no public option, it will be a windfall to the insurance companies. Um, no it won’t. In return for being paid premiums, the insurance companies will have to provide health insurance to people. It seems like many lefties aren’t thinking clearly — they’re beholden to the notion that anything corporate is evil, that health insurance companies are the spawn of hell. They’re more interested in punishing insurance companies than in helping millions of Americans get health insurance. They think that if insurance companies benefit, that must mean that everyone else loses. But be real. Just because you hate insurance companies, doesn’t mean they are evil. The world is not in line with your emotional reality. It’s really immature to see the world through the eyes of Michael Moore. I don’t like it when right-wingers see the world as black and white, and I don’t like it when left-wingers do so either.

It’s the Nader voters all over again.

Furthermore, one of the problems with our health insurance system is that lots of healthy people don’t buy insurance, meaning that the risk pool is smaller and somewhat skewed toward the unhealthy. A bigger risk pool is better, because it results in lower premiums for everyone. And the risk pools will increase by 30 million people.

Even if these numbers are off and it’s just 20 million more people with health insurance, that’s still phenomenal, and it’s the greatest progress in health care that we’ve had in more than 40 years.

I also read something that said under the current bill, insurance companies will be able to charge older people three times as much as younger people, and OMG how horrible that would be. Um, as opposed to now, when there is no limit on what they can charge?

So, yes, this bill could have been a lot better, and it’s Obama’s fault as well as Reid’s, as well as the fault of every senator who opposes a public option and a Medicare buy-in. (It’s also the Republicans’ fault, of course, but that goes without saying.)

But there’s lots of great stuff in this bill. It needs to pass. In the early 1970s, the Democrats scrapped a health care deal with Richard Nixon because it wasn’t good enough for them, and what did they get for it? Nothing.

If they don’t pass this bill now, there won’t be another chance for years.