There was something about the way that Barack Obama walked on stage at The Daily Show on Tuesday night. When Jon Stewart introduced the president for the sixth and final time, Obama applauded as much as the audience did. He clapped, presumably for Stewart and the crowd, and walked across the set with poise and confidence. Obama strode out looking like a boss.
So often on talkshows, where they always feel a bit vulnerable, politicians display some false modesty or pander to the audience. Not Obama. He behaved as though he belonged there, and that everyone was happy to see him. It’s as if he was returning to Rome after salting the earth of some Carthaginian village. When appearing before an audience as liberal as the one at The Daily Show (and those watching at home), Obama is a little bit like the conquering hero, especially after his recent peace accord with Iran.
But after the hugs and a few jokes about how he is going to issue an executive order to keep Stewart from leaving the show, what we were really looking at was two men looking to cement their legacies with the public.
This was Stewart’s last time interviewing Obama before leaving his post at The Daily Show in mid-August. Obama has been appearing on the show since 2005, when he was a senator, but this interview was a lot less harsh than Stewart’s questioning of the commander-in-chief than his 2012 visit. But still Stewart was pressing the president on important matters, showing off his skill as an interviewer and displaying one of the sharper political minds in the media, though one that is quicker to make a joke about “future president Trump” than most others.
But what Stewart was really flaunting was his pulling power. Just as Letterman did before his big send-off earlier this year, Stewart was proving that he is capable of having the leader of the free world answer his questions, quite a feat for a smart-ass equal-opportunity offender with a show on basic cable. Stewart chided Obama about which countries the US is working with, and which it is working against, in the Middle East, and joked that after invading Afghanistan, funding the Iraqi military, bombing Libya, and arming militants in Syria, the thing that finally worked in Iran was diplomacy. Still, when Obama was about to talk about the Middle East more generally, Stewart let him off the hook and took a commercial break. Stewart was going to throw hard balls, but he was more like a pitching machine, lobbing them right into the strike zone so that Obama could knock them out of the park.
And knock them out of the park he did. Obama was clearly here to talk about Iran and to make sure that the American public knew about the peace accord. “I want people to pay attention to this issue,” he said. He even pleaded with the audience at the end of the segment to contact their representatives about making sure his diplomatic solution gets the support it needs and we avoid a “military option”. It’s clear that this is a treaty Obama wants people to be talking about at the Barack Hussein Obama Library in Chicago in 2055 and beyond.
Still, the “write your senator” rhetoric, as tired and outdated as an I Love Lucy rerun, seemed a little bit hollow. “If people are engaged, eventually the political system responds,” he said. “Despite the money, despite the lobbyists, it still responds.” Really? I’m not sure. But it’s nice to hear he thinks that.
In fact, Obama spoke eloquently about how the work he did in the early part of his administration on things like Iran, health care, and climate change is finally paying off. When answering Stewart’s plea for making charity work compulsory for American youth, Obama expressed hope for young people and the enthusiasm they have for making this country a greater place. Most politicians would just make some easy cracks about how kids can’t put down Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, but Obama insisted that if we give them the opportunity to help out those in need, they will. He even thinks that the White House was slow to respond to the media revolution that is currently underway and needs to adapt more to social media. Stewart offered Obama an opportunity for a prime “Kids, get off of my lawn” rant, but instead he went in the other direction, leaning more toward the future than moralizing about a better past.
But Obama’s real mastery here is one of tone, something that has often eluded past presidents. He clearly knows that he’s better at taking a joke than making a joke. He laughs appropriately when Stewart brings the funny, but he doesn’t try to get in on the comedy like George W Bush or Bill Clinton would have, inevitably embarrassing themselves when their jokes landed as badly as the woman in the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” commercial. Obama stayed on script, but shared the stage with Stewart, two men basking in the afterglow of the best parts of their careers, and it was a sunset worth posting on Instagram.
