The road to the vice presidential nomination goes though… late night?
Of course it does. Or at least it’s now included on the whistle-stop TV tours the many wannabe partners to Kamala Harris, currently the most talked-about woman in America, have initiated in the past week.
Pete Buttigieg validated that premise Monday night when, just 10 days after appearing on Real Time With Bill Maher, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, pulled his hat up to the New York studio of The Daily Show, marched inside, and tossed it in the direction of Jon Stewart.
Calls should be expected from the reps of Josh Shapiro, Mark Kelly, Andy Beshear, Tim Walz et al. in the coming days.
To be fair, Pete—much easier to spell on subsequent references than Buttigieg, and much easier for an audience to chant, which they did ecstatically Monday night—began his personal “pick-me!” tour with a considerable advantage over his competitors in the “veepstakes” (one of TV news’ most irritating clichés.)
Why? Because Pete is flat-out brilliant on television, as every embarrassed Fox News host has learned the hard way after inviting him on as a guest.
And he proved that again Monday with Stewart, who seemed as charmed by Pete as his audience, who embraced the nation’s Secretary of Transportation as though completely transported themselves.
Pete also set himself apart by not denying he was in the running to be the VP nominee. Generally those under consideration cut and juke away from every question about whether they know the selection process includes them.
That position makes sense because a) you are not supposed to come off as too eager and b) you don’t want it public when you’ve been passed over. (Almost surely the reason one widely bruited name, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, came up with a reason yesterday to say he would not pursue the position.)
But when Stewart came right at Pete by asking if he knew he was being vetted, the answer was a simple: yes. And that led to a couple of funny minutes of what it’s like to have a close encounter of the vetting kind with your party elders.
When Pete began an answer by talking about the “process” the Harris people were using to vet candidates, Stewart said, “Everything you say, even that, is being vetted.”
To which Pete confessed, “Probably.” And earned a big laugh.
He then equated the “process” to what happened when he and his husband Chasten were vetted by an adoption agency. Which is known in the politics business as “humanizing” yourself, skillfully.
Whether by chance because the vetting questions covered it, or out of simple courtesy, Stewart did not ask Buttigieg directly if he really wanted to wear the silver medal for the next four years, or what he thinks his chances are. But Stewart certainly didn’t hurt them.
And, perhaps coincidentally, Buttigieg didn’t hurt himself either by appearing as the guest in the best edition of The Daily Show since Stewart returned to the show that made him an icon of late night.
The set-up was certainly ideal: the first show back since the Earth cracked open eight days ago, exploding the presidential Richter scale. Stewart’s sense of the historical tectonic plates having shifted led to a show that recalled the best of Stewart’s comedic and acerbic talents from his Emmy-drenched original run on the show.
That included a “black box play” about downtrodden, shawl-draped Democrats from the shtetl lamenting (in black and white) how the future, a.k.a. the return of Donald Trump, had seemed so bleak. Until the sudden switch in the ticket led to the “joy of a statistical tie, which right now feels like a victory.”
It also included the skewering of a chorus of Democratic voices who only days earlier were disparaging any idea of replacing Joe Biden, which concluded with one astute pundit issuing a no-nonsense statement that people had three choices: vote for Trump, vote for Biden, “or you stay on the couch.”
OK, fish in a barrel. But impossible to pass up the laugh: “I think we know which one of those options J.D. Vance would opt for,” Stewart opined.
Stewart paused to admit even he didn’t feel good about that joke, though he wasn’t turning down the big laughs.
The whole monologue played like a classic score of joke beats and ringing shots at Trump madness. An extended riff on ludicrous misogynist and racist bombs being tossed at Harris culminated in the perfect line commenting on attacks based on reports that a lot of her staff quit due to her being a “bullying boss.”
“Are you kidding me?” Stewart said, with righteous anger. “Your candidate’s Donald Trump!”
But let’s save some special praise for two of the best jokes of the campaign season so far.
One: “It’s so sexist to say Kamala Harris slept her way to the top. Joe Biden and Donald Trump literally slept their way to the top and we never heard a f**king peep about it!” (Cut to the photo below.)
And my personal favorite: Commenting on the outraged howls to the moon about how Biden’s dropping out this late was undermining Republican plans to waltz back into the White House in a landslide, Stewart professed to understand how this especially aggrieved the endlessly aggrieved MAGA world.
“It makes sense that they’re upset,” Stewart said, sympathetically. “So how about we do this? Out of fairness. I’m a fair person: You can replace your old guy too!”
Stewart punctuated the line with a couple of “Booms!”
Who could blame him?
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