I can see how if you look for a common theme between my piece and that, you might go, wow, the show’s really jumped on board the Hillary campaign. That was something that Tina came in with-she was hosting that week. What about Tina and Amy doing that “Go Bitches” thing on Weekend Update?Ī. I was just trying to write a funny piece and say something that wasn’t crazy. And I know from within-I have indirect connections with the Obama campaign and less so with the Hillary campaign-but a guy I know who’s a political pollster and does campaigns told me that the Hillary people certainly loved that piece and they thought it sort of saved their campaign. It was the sort of thing that made the press want to report on it-is the press in the tank for Obama? Joe Klein had a thing in Time about the SNL effect. I could understand how Hillary wanted people to see the sketch. It was more of the fact that media seemed to acknowledge a truth there that made me feel slightly flattered. After that debate sketch, Hillary Clinton mentioned it during an actual debate. You know, the kind of covers without any caption or anything? It’s the kind of thing that was later to manifest itself with like that Rolling Stone cover, which was almost like the kind of thing you see in South America, of party leaders or Jesus or something. That was a very sort of cynical, kind of snarky attitude but at the same time there was a reverential attitude about the Obama campaign. On the one hand, a sort of a hard-on for Hillary that the press had-just really enjoyed her frustration and her discomfiture and faltering. It seemed to me that there were two things that had sort of emerged in the preceding four months. I had had my own observations about how the Democratic primary had been shaping up beginning in the late fall, and after we came back from the strike in late February, Obama had won the Iowa caucuses and Hillary had to make a comeback in New Hampshire. The idea was that come hell or high water, when we returned from the strike, we were going to open with a debate piece, and I was sort of the guy who does those. How did that Obama-Hillary debate sketch come about?Ī. You know, one of my biggest peeves in life is what Dave Letterman and I used to talk about-he used to term it derisively ‘important comedy.’ It was how annoying it was that there were comics who would start to think of themselves as important forces for good, such as Lenny Bruce, that kind of thing. Your sketches have actually had some impact on the 2008 election.Ī. It’s an American voice, a Midwestern mom. Tina was saying it’s a voice she did onstage in Second City. I’ve heard her do that voice, and some of us within the show, we were struck that this would be something Tina could do and only 5 percent of it was the glasses. But the key thing about Tina was, she’s a really great subtle performer and she can also do that voice. I thought if that was all there was to it, you could put any number of women in that hair and the glasses and you’d have your Sarah Palin. I said, I get it, because they both wear glasses. So after she was picked, everyone I’ve ever met in my life was calling me going, Oh, you’ve got to have Tina Fey. I knew who Sarah Palin was because I read the Almanac of American Politics but until I heard her speak, which almost no one had outside of Alaska, I had no idea she had that sort of upper Midwest mom accent. Tina Fey’s been a major figure this year, as Sarah Palin, right?Ī. CNN has become the middle of the road and MSNBC the left. CNN always took the most left-leaning elements of my piece, Fox the most right-leaning, and MSNBC was kind of down the middle. They were running my stuff all the time on all of the network news channels and each of the big three-CNN, Fox and MSNBC-would from the same sketch mine different elements. A: Yes, the Bush-Gore debate pieces which were written about in The Times because the Gore campaign staff showed him the sketches as an instructional tool, say, see this is how you can be caricatured if you act that way, and that led to his reaction in the second debate where he was way too passive.
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