CANDIDATES ON THE COUCH

Last week, Democrat Barack Obama dropped by The Daily Show With Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, which the previous week entertained John McCain, who this week did The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, whose guest next week might well be Republican Fred Thompson.
In talk show booking terms, the 2008 presidential campaign has come to resemble a large Hollywood ensemble movie, multiple actors fanning across the wilderness of late-night TV to plug the same product.
This is probably why there was a noticeable lack of ceremony to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s appearance last Thursday night on the Late Show with David Letterman — a ho-hum-ness that suggests both how neutralised these spots have become and how adept candidates are at this ritual of the trail.
As the dean of late-night inquisitors, Letterman is particularly arch and counter-intuitive, but he began the interview by asking what kind of summer jobs Clinton had growing up, conjuring for us the human being inside the pol. He was wearing kid gloves, waiting until the third segment and time was running short to say: “It occurs to me, and help me through this, that likely there will be an American military presence in the country of Iraq forever?”
“I sure hope not,” she reponded, then ticked off her Iraq platform.
You can’t run for president anymore without being good at late-night repertory.
Obama on Stewart last week yielded the same sort of TV non event. Maybe that’s why the most interesting candidate-guest these days is Mike Huckabee, the dark horse. There he was, the so-called pro-gun, doesn’t-believe-in-evolution candidate, back on Maher’s self-described “heathen talk show” last Friday night.
And they got into it on the God-versus-evolution issue, Huckabee arguing that he isn’t running for eighth-grade science teacher and Maher pressing him with: “If someone believes that the Earth is 6,000 years old, when every scientist in the world tells us it’s billions of years old, why shouldn’t I take that into account when I’m assessing the rationality of someone I’m going to put into the highest office?”
“Look, I’m gonna go on the side that there’s a creator behind it,” Huckabee finally said.
-Paul Brownfield (LAT-WP)