The former governor of Massachusetts and multimillionaire corporate-buyout consultant had to survive some stiff Republican primary competition, including Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and the two Ricks, Perry and Santorum. But Mitt Romney—or, in one of The Daily Show’s elaborations, “Willard Scott Mittington Romneysaurus”—triumphed. Romney’s supposed gaffe, declaring that “corporations are people,” turned out to be an apt preview of one part of his general election strategy—an appeal to conservatives and business elites. The other part was tarring Obama as an incompetent lefty socialist giving away what the “makers” had earned to the undeserving “takers.” Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party were stoking populism on the left and right, and the subprime mortgage crisis and Wall Street bailouts were still fresh. It all turned the 2012 presidential campaign into a fierce debate over the economy and privilege, and pushed The Daily Show toward starker takes on money and power.
I’ve always been really proud of our convention and road trip coverage. The sequence of 2012 debate coverage of Romney and Obama, and both of the conventions, but especially the Clint Eastwood Republican one, those had the combination we strive for—really fucking funny stuff and also some pinpoint insight.
The most enjoyable example of seeing something happen and saying, “Well, we know what we’re doing tomorrow,” was in the 2012 conventions. We were in Tampa because the Republicans decided, for Lord knows what reasons, to hold the thing in Tampa in late August. It was disgusting.
Anyway, we were sitting in our offices watching the normal convention stuff and taking notes. The writers who were assigned to it would stay up until one or two in the morning writing material and then coming in the next morning to either finish it or just hand it in and it would get rewritten. But watching Clint Eastwood talk to an empty chair as if Barack Obama was there, and ramble on and be very jokey and abusive, it was so clear that this was not planned by anybody. The Romney campaign, there’s no way they could have meant for this to happen. All of our mouths were open.
To us, the Eastwood bit we did on the show was a statement not just about how the convention or how that campaign was going, but about what had been infecting the entire Republican Party since 2008. They have this fantasy version of the Obama presidency that they are incredibly upset about, but it’s not real, and in fact, it’s invisible. But that doesn’t stop them from ranting about it. It’s real to them.
The next month, Romney himself provided the material. A bartender working at a $50,000-per-plate fund-raising lunch in Florida recorded video of the plutocrat Republican presidential nominee claiming that 47 percent of the American public would vote for Obama because they were feeding at the government benefits trough.
In the writers’ room during meetings I was always knitting, and I got a reputation for saying the most dark, horrible things, but as long as I was knitting I could get away with them. Like when Romney was caught saying 47 percent of Americans will vote for the Democrats because they’re moochers. I said something like, “Now he and his running mate will know what it feels like to carry a dead baby to term.”
No, we did not do that joke on the show! But the 2012 campaign did bring together a lot of issues for us. We had a recurring bit called “World of Class Warfare,” playing off the name of the game, but inspired largely by the business networks. Fox Business, they can get away with voicing the id of the right a little more than they could on main Fox. They used the word “moocher class” over and over, and proved it by saying that 97 percent of poor people had fridges… because poor people really deserve to be eating rotten food. This is not an impassioned and honest difference of opinion about trickle-down economics. This is just bullshit.
Those pieces, we surfed on a wave of pure rage. It may have peaked in one segment called “The Poor’s Free Ride is Over.” These guys on the business networks were talking about the half of the population who don’t pay taxes. They cited the figures for the budget shortfall that needed to be made up by taxing the moochers.
And in rewrite, a half hour before the show, Jon did the math, on the back of a plate or something. He calculated that we would have to tax the poor 100 percent, take everything they own, their entire wealth, to make that number the business network guys wanted. That was when the piece was nailed, and it was all Jon.
Neil Cavuto: [in video clip, from his Fox show Your World] “Warren Buffett writing how the rich should pay more taxes but saying not a word about the half of American households that pay no income taxes at all.”
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] So the solution to our economic problem isn’t taxing the rich… Maybe Fox is right. Maybe the bottom 50 percent of Americans, while they already pay excise and payroll and Medicare taxes, do need to pay more. I mean, they can spare it. After all, they control 2.5 percent of our nation’s wealth. [pie chart graphic from Business Insider showing bottom 50 percent with tiny sliver]
Robert Rector, Heritage Foundation: [in video clip, being interviewed by Fox’s Stuart Varney] “When you look at the actual living conditions of the 43 million people that the census says are ‘poor,’ you see that in fact they have all these modern conveniences.”
Stuart Varney: “Ninety-nine percent of ’em have a refrigerator.”
Jon Stewart: You food-chilling motherfuckers! How dare you! I’m sure the 1 percent of those people who don’t have refrigerators don’t have them not because they don’t have food, but because they’re always ordering room service!… So you see, the problem with increasing the marginal tax rate on the rich and closing some corporate tax loopholes isn’t that it engages in class warfare. It’s that it’s fighting on the wrong side of the war.
Neal Boortz: [in video clip, on Fox Business Channel, standing in front of palm trees and luxury marina] “It is all-out war on the productive class in our society for the benefit of the moocher class!”
Ann Coulter: [in video clip, on Fox Business Channel, above graphic reading, COULTER: DEMS WOULD BE DELIGHTED IF VIOLENT MOB AROSE HERE] “Welfare will create generations of utterly irresponsible animals.”
Jon Stewart: Yeah! Fuck those people! [over-the-shoulder photo appears, of elderly man sitting on a threadbare couch] The poor!
That was also the piece where Jon mentioned my name on the air, because I’d come up with a joke about the amount of money that Warren Buffett’s cleaning lady pulls out of his drain, and there’s a funny graphic for it, with a maid holding a big old hairball. It was a nice emotional break from the heaviness of the topic and the rage. Have I mentioned the rage?
Others at The Daily Show may have dabbled in rage. For Lewis Black, it was a milieu, a metier, an art form, and a job description. After acting his way through the first two years under the Stewart regime, Black found a happy-unhappy groove, usually writing “Back in Black” with J. R. Havlan; in later years, Travon Free was also a valuable collaborator.
Travon is young and he’s black, which makes it interesting. And these kids really got my voice. They grew up listening to it.
I listened to every album Lewis ever made probably five times a week as I walked around campus at Long Beach State. And so if you watch and listen to Lewis, he has a methodology to the way he constructs jokes before he gets to the part that makes him angry. I internalized the build and the structure of how he talks and how he thinks. So if you just told me an issue, I could pretty much figure out his point of view and then filter it, getting him to doing that thing everyone loves, which is when he shouts and points or does the really low tone, really angry thing. Mastering Lewis is understanding the heart of why someone’s pissed off about something, or why something is stupid, or why something is crazy.
Black’s segments could still be wildly funny tangents about, say, artisanal crystal meth or the need for a Trump 2012 presidential campaign (“This is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life, a president who’s not afraid to tell the truth about being a lying asshole!”), but over the years many of Black’s rants were vein-bulging exclamation points to The Daily Show’s main themes.
Lewis Black: The presidential campaign is in full swing and every day brings another bland stump speech…
President Barack Obama: [in video clip, at podium] “Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that… The point is, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”
Lewis Black: Most Americans hear that and they fall asleep. But not the Romney campaign!
[Video clip of Romney ad begins, showing business owners watching clip of Obama saying, “You didn’t build that”—but not the rest of Obama’s statement]
Businesswoman: “I can’t believe he just said that!”
Lewis Black: I can’t believe it, either—because he didn’t just say that! Campaigns have finally arrived in the twenty-first century—they can produce bullshit at the same rate as actual bulls!
Rage, amazement, disgust, giddiness—the 2012 campaign didn’t lack for emotional extremes and provocations. In September, Fox News’s flailing attempts to explain away the Romney 47 percent controversy spurred The Daily Show to scale the dizzying heights of “Bullshit Mountain.”
Kate Obenshain, Republican Strategist: [in Fox interview montage] “He wasn’t criticizing them! He was saying that the American dream should be open to everybody.”
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] “You’re looking at and hearing the cynical, condescending, plutocratic words he was saying—not the aspirational, optimistic message he in retrospect should have been meaning!” It’s like Romney jazz! It’s the words you don’t hear.
Sean Hannity: [in video clip from his show] “This is factually accurate, what Romney is saying.”
Stuart Varney: [in Fox News video clip] “I think this will be seen as a win for Romney.”
Jon Stewart: Let me sum up the message from Bullshit Mountain, if I may: This inartfully stated dirty liberal smear is a truthful expression of Mitt Romney’s political philosophy—and it is a winner!
Sean Hannity: “Tonight, the GOP presidential nominee delivers one of his sharpest critiques yet of President Obama and the entitlement society that he enables.”
Jon Stewart: This is the core of Bullshit Mountain. That somehow only since Obama, the half of Americans who love this country and work hard and are “good” have had the fruits of their labor seized and handed over to the half of this nation that is lazy and dependent and the opposite of good… Now in that 49 percent, Hannity is including those on Social Security and Medicare—or, as I like to call them, his audience. But perhaps Mr. Hannity is understating the problem. For there are many more of those on the government dole than even his 49 percent accounts for. Like those welfare queens at Exxon Mobil, AT&T, GE, the 250 corporations that from 2008 to 2010 got nearly a quarter trillion in federal tax subsidies… or the incredible tax breaks the government gives the investor class… Boy, I wish we had a poster boy for that element of the moochocracy. [photo of Romney appears on screen next to Stewart] Oh, right. In 2010, Governor Romney… got an absolutely fair tax break of four and a half million dollars… in moocher-class dependency terms, enough food stamps to feed Mr. Romney through the year 4870. By the way, that’s no bullshit. That’s the math.
The Romney campaign certainly took more shots from The Daily Show than Obama did during “Indecision 2012.” But the president didn’t escape criticism, because Stewart cared more about Obama’s first-term record than about the current horse race. And the White House cared that Stewart cared. First Lady Michelle Obama appeared as a Daily Show guest in May, followed by her husband in October, timed for when the campaign was coming down to the wire.
The president sat down for interviews with Diane Sawyer, Brian Williams, and Scott Pelley, and afterward I remember we compared those three interviews with Jon’s interview, and Jon’s was the most policy driven of the four. The other three were much more focused on the political news of the day. His interview was tougher than the three network news anchors’.
Jon Stewart: So you’re the president now. Before, when you ran you had certain things you thought. I wonder if four years as president has in any way changed that. First is, we don’t have to trade our values and ideals for our security.
President Barack Obama: We don’t.
Jon Stewart: Do you still feel that way?
President Obama: We don’t. There’s some things that we haven’t gotten done. I still want to close Guantánamo, we haven’t gotten that through Congress. One of the things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place and we need congressional help to do that.
Jon Stewart: I think people have been surprised to see the strength of the Bush-era warrantless wiretapping and those sorts of things not also be lessened.
President Obama: The truth is actually that we’ve modified them and built a legal structure and safeguards in place that weren’t there before on a whole range of issues. Now, they aren’t really sexy issues.
Jon Stewart: You don’t know what I find sexy.
The president won a second term three weeks later, and he was soon being reminded about one issue that Stewart found enragingly irresistible, though hardly sexy.
Obama’s Department of Veterans Affairs had a regulation limiting former soldiers to medical treatment within a forty-mile straight-line radius of their homes; after a Daily Show segment ridiculing the red tape, the rule was changed to allow for driving distance. Then a cinematic two-part Samantha Bee field piece, in which she strapped on night-vision goggles and “raided” the Manhattan office of the VA, chronicled one vet’s bureaucratic nightmare.
When you try to put false premises on things, you’re just wringing comedy out of a dry cloth. I don’t care for those pieces. I like a real story that means something to me or means something to other people. One great example was “Zero Dark 900,000.” That was a story that came out of Miles Kahn’s head, to conduct a search for an Iraq War vet’s benefit claim form that was lost in the bureaucracy, and to shoot the piece like a movie.
I love VA stories. Not that I love the problems that the VA is having. I’m very interested in stories where people have sacrificed their entire lives, and they are getting the short end of the stick. It’s fascinating, it’s horrifying, it’s unbelievable.
Eugene Manning, the Iraq vet we featured, got a call from the VA after that piece. It’s sad that it took us shooting a two-part piece to get one person his benefits. But I’ll take it. I’ll take one guy, if that’s what helped him.
There were bullshit internal politics at The Daily Show sometimes. But I got to write and direct things that were seen by millions of people, and that once in a while actually made a difference.
The Daily Show didn’t just shine a light on the hassles facing veterans. In 2013, with no fanfare, Stewart had producers Elise Terrell and Camille Hebert set up the Veteran Immersion Program: In six-week cycles, a total of seventy former soldiers got training in TV production, followed by job-placement assistance. Stewart and staff members helped the cause in other ways, too.
I was with them on a service project, and we were fixing up a school in Brooklyn. I was painting, inside, and I went out to clear my head of the fumes, and there’s Jon Stewart, raking. He has his kids with him. And I said, “Jon! What the hell are you doing here?” He said, “Raking. And you’re… painting.” He did not draw any attention to himself. He didn’t make a speech. He didn’t have a photographer with him. He was willing to stand for selfies, but he just did his work and left, drove himself home. And I thought, what a total mensch.
Meanwhile, Stewart was racing to complete his Rosewater script and cast the movie—a process so hectic that he wouldn’t cast a key role, the movie’s villain, until Stewart was in Amman, Jordan, two weeks before filming started.
In June 2013, during a break in shooting the movie, Stewart traveled to Cairo and appeared on Bassem Youssef’s show. The city was on edge. Two weeks later, millions of protesters took to the streets demonstrating against Morsi, who was then removed by a military coup. Youssef, his freedom and his show now at even greater risk, went to Amman and consulted with Stewart.
After the thirtieth of June, I was scared to go back on the air, because now it’s the military regime in charge. Jon said, “So quit. It’s not worth it.” And I said, “I can’t. All of these people are depending on me.” So he gave me the best advice ever. He told me to make fun of what you feel. If you’re feeling scared, make fun of that. If you’re feeling that you cannot talk about someone, make fun of that. So we did just that.
Months later the Egyptian government essentially forced his show off the air.
Did I make a difference? Because I was trying to make a difference, and people were following me, but the masses of people who followed the show didn’t do anything or raise a finger when the show was taken out. That’s the power of oppression. So, at the end of the day, I left Egypt.
The consequences were significantly less severe, of course, but Stewart was highly interested in setting up a peaceful transition of power at The Daily Show. So before leaving New York for the summer he placed his first choice of successor behind the desk for a test run.