November 17th, 2008 By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
It still wasn’t as big an attraction as football, but CBS’ 60 Minutes interview with President Elect Barack Obama got monster ratings and was the best audience the usually high-rated show has gotten in 9 years:
Barack Obama’s first televised post-election interview gave Sunday night’s “60 Minutes” its biggest audience in at least nine years.
The CBS News program was seen by 24.5 million viewers and earned a 6.4 preliminary adults 18-49 rating. That marks the show’s largest viewership since 1999.
Veteran correspondent Steve Kroft interviewed Obama about a range of domestic and foreign policy issues in the show’s opening 15-minute segment, then he spoke to Obama alongside his wife, Michelle, for two more segments covering how the election has impacted their family. Obama said the government should help the U.S. auto industry and reiterated his plan to pull troops out of Iraq, though the president-elect largely refused to answer questions about his cabinet choices, saying only that announcements would be made “soon.”
“60 Minutes” has been on a ratings roll this season. Last week’s episode interviewing Obama’s top four advisers gave the program its highest audience in a year. Even with Sunday’s record-setting numbers, CBS expects the “Minutes” numbers might get even higher tomorrow when the national ratings are released since some time zones aired the lower-rated “The Amazing Race” during part of the “Minutes” hour.
The most notable characteristics of this interview: (1) Obama was interested in talking about substantive issues rather than indulging in any partisan triumphalism and he stressed how labels such as liberal and conservative won’t matter to him in seeking solutions, (2) the great chemistry between him and his wife Michelle Obama, (3) how different the TONE was in this versus other interviews with many politicians. Obama showed an engaging coolness, quick smile and an at-times playful wit. These three factors could serve him well in the White House.
In the late 20th century acting moved from a theatrical, melodramatic style that didn’t really sound like real people talking to a more natural “method” style that dominates acting today. Is our often pompous politics and the way politicians talk now making a shift, too? Communication is not a small matter. And Obama clearly has the skills.
In the White House, she will be both a working wife and a stay-at-home mom, trying to give her daughters as normal a childhood as they can have living with the eyes of the world always on them.
Even their new pet won’t have a dog’s life. In a 1963 interview, JFK told me with bemusement, “We got more letters about the puppies born here than the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.”
Michelle Obama has always been “a working mom,” her friend Valerie Jarrett said on Meet the Press Sunday. “She knows how hard it is to manage being a mom, a spouse, have a professional job…Her first priority as she comes to Washington and moves into the White House are those two darling girls, making sure that they are OK, getting them in school, getting them comfortable. Her mom, Mary Robinson, is coming with them, and so she’ll have her hands full.”
Now that Barack Obama Junior is safely America’s president-to-be, his stepmother has decided to speak to the press about her courtship and relationship with Barack Obama Senior. According to this interview with Grace Keziah Obama from Kenya’s Standard newspaper, the father of our President elect was quite a lady killer and, ‘He liked fun and loved good things. Which is why I wasn’t surprised when I heard that he had married a second wife in the U.S.’ She is referring, of course, to President-elect Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham.
“She was only 16 and attending school. She had no idea that the young man courting her that Christmas night in 1956, would one day father the future president of the most powerful nation on earth. He asked to dance with me during a party and I couldn’t turn him down. He picked me out of several girls that were there. A few days later, I married him … He paid 14 cows as dowry for me, which were delivered in two batches. That was because he loved me so greatly.”
Many observers have been having a grand old time making light of President Elect Barack Obama’s promise to bring a puppy into the White House for his children. I would like to suggest that there is a bit more to this story than throwaway fluff pieces and one-liners for Leno and Letterman. Obama addressed this briefly during is first press conference.
Between addressing his plans for the economy and his transition to the White House, Obama noted that whatever dog they get will have to be hypoallergenic so as not to aggravate daughter Malia’s allergies.
He also confirmed that the family’s intention is to adopt a dog from a shelter, although Malia’s medical concerns may preclude that.
“But, obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts, like me,” Obama said. “So, whether we’re going to be able to balance those two things, I think, is a pressing issue on the Obama household.”
Having volunteered for and supported the Humane Society - as well as other animal support and rescue groups - for most of my adult life, I applaud anyone who makes room in their home and their life for our four legged friends. I’ve also picked up a thing or two along the way and would like to bend our next president’s plus sized ear on the subject. (Yes, yes… now that he’s officially elected, let me be among the first to begin making fun of Obama’s “open taxi door” ears. If you don’t like, you can go whistle.)
Somewhere in the higher-than-usual percentage of undecided voters in the late stages of an almost two-year campaign are those who can’t or won’t vote for an African-American candidate.
The good news for Barack Obama is that, as his lead in the national polls grows toward double digits, it may, as gamblers say, “cover the spread.”
Michelle Obama recently dismissed the Bradley Effect by pointing to the primary vote that gave her husband the nomination, but that overlooks the late surge by Hillary Clinton among white voters in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Rep. John Murtha, in his usual blunt way, recently pointed out that race matters.
Is there some sort of parallel between pugilism and the political arena? BJ at Newshoggers brings you the story of a middleweight champion who takes down his opponent, gives a shout-out to Barack and Michelle Obama, and moves in next door to Joe Biden.
No matter. Even with the denial, it’ll become a raging subject on some Web sites that will dismiss the denial, and on talk radio which will present it as fact. Which would be exactly the intent. Then there’s common sense: Why would the Democrats give the GOP such a gift?
My father and mother were the blackest white people whom I have ever known. What I mean by that is that not only were some of their best friends Negroes, to use the painfully archaic cliche of their day, they talked the talk and they walked the walk as civil-rights activists. But despite being optimistic about most things they were unable to imagine the day that a black person could become president of the United States.
Joe and Jane Mullen were never denied a hotel room or turned away at a lunch counter, but both had been the victims of prejudice and that made their commitment to social justice and deep feelings for the disenfranchised all the more real.
My father’s parents were immigrants. He grew up in grinding poverty and was taunted for his ratty clothes, Irish lineage and Catholicism.
My mother’s father was a German Jew who arrived in America with 12 cents in his pocket and her mother an Anglican from an old Philadelphia family.
She felt the prejudice that her father experienced, and in a coup de grâce administered by a Catholic Church steeped in its own special brand of prejudice, she and my father had to be married in a sub assistant priest’s vestry office and not a church because . . . well, you know, that Jewish problem.
I will never forget my father, by then very much a lapsed Catholic, telling me after returning home from Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Had a Dream” speech in Washington, that he had felt a kinship and spirituality that day unlike anything he had ever felt in church.
In the best of times, the presidency is a tough job. One can come in with all sorts of high-falutin’ ideas and goals, but something always comes up to complicate things. People flying airplanes into buildings… radicals taking a bunch of diplomats hostage… It’s always some dang thing or another.
I’m quickly coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter who wins the presidential election or how many seats each party holds in Congress. Our national leaders are going to be facing some hard times across the nation next year, and the occupant of the Oval Office may not be able to count on more than four years in the seat.
For a couple of weeks now, my thinking has run along exactly these same lines.
Pick your favorite analogy: the “bottomless” financial well is running dry; the money tree is nearly bare. However you choose to look at it, we’re about to scrape the bottom of the barrel — and although both campaigns are publicly dodging reality at the moment, there’s really no getting around it.
If McCain or Obama forge ahead with their promises, the nation will be economically crushed — perhaps permanently. If they don’t (and frankly, they can’t), they’ll be despised by their “base”. Worse yet, any path they choose will not improve the coming economic difficulties for our nation in the short run, or the medium.
Even if the future holds no surprises (yeah, right!), a President Obama or a President McCain is going to be supremely unpopular. The next administration may not make George Bush look like the Homecoming King in comparison, but it might be close. Not only that, but in 2012 (or even 2010), people won’t be blaming the administration that came before.
They’ll blame whoever is in office then.
I think if I were Michelle or Cindy, I’d be gently suggesting that Dear Husband sit this next four years out.
September 13th, 2008 By T-STEEL, Site Administrator
With the McCain campaign’s recent “lipstick on a pig” manufactured outrage and terrible misrepresented sex education ad against Obama coupled with the Obama campaign’s equally silly “McCain can’t e-mail” ad, I just have to say this:
The is no honor among thieves…
The McCain campaign stole the “change” mantra and the Obama campaign stole the “experience” mantra. And now they are trying to out silly each other. Punditry says this hurts Obama more than McCain. I beg to differ. Both look like dunces. When I saw Obama and McCain emerge from their primaries, I actually thought that this could be a different type of election. One where issues took precedence and they would show some statesmanship. Alas! I was wrong. It’s jailhouse humor time and the inmates are craving for more.
I blame America’s insatiable appetite for celebrities. Barack Obama became a celebrity. So much so that the McCain campaign went and got the self-proclaimed “pitbull with lipstick” Sarah Palin. And Palin’s celebrity status went up exponentially. Look at how Saturday Night Live is working hard to pull a former Saturday Night Live cast member back into the fold to play Sarah Palin. Obama’s celebrity caused the McCain campaign to get silly and Palin’s light speed celebrity caused the Obama campaign to get silly. I think I’m going to start reading Perez Hilton more since he knows how to cover celebrities THE RIGHT WAY instead of the utterly weird way political pundits cover celebrities: without any humor or flair! Slackers…
But since this election as morphed into who can out celeb and out silly each other, I have a clear picture of who should be our next President and Vice-President. The ticket I’m writing in and voting this November. A ticket that will bring this country together or they will kick our butts: Sarah Palin/Michelle Obama ‘08!!
Just look at them!
PRESIDENT “PITBULL WITH LIPSTICK” SARAH PALIN!
VP “RADICAL BLACK LADY” MICHELLE OBAMA!
That’s enough edge to cause our enemies to tremble, eh? Domestic financial trouble? BAH! Prez Palin applies the “pitbull jaw lock” on Wall Street. That’ll learn those New York City types! Senate getting fiesty? VP Obama (Michelle) will go straight Black Panthers on them!
The Pitbull and the Black Radical… That’s a celebrity, historic American Presidential ticket for the ages. You may hate Hollywood but Hollywood doesn’t hate you… You big celebrity lovers!
UPDATE
I just realized that Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama look like my junior high school principal and assistant principal. Even better! Nothing like having a few grade school principals sitting in cabinet meetings. Someone gets out of line, it’s off to detention.
Exasperation over the standard of debate in the U.S presidential race is definitely global, and in ‘Old Europe,’ this exasperation centers on how sex and religion insert themselves into a debate that ought to be about better public policy.
“What I don’t understand is all the fuss about Sarah Palin. She, the clueless, internationally inexperienced Governor of the pygmy state of Alaska has been chosen by John McCain to be the Vice President of the United States, and all the media can get animated over is the fact that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is expecting a child?”
“Why should I be at all interested in their husbands or wives, their mothers or children?
What does it matter if Palin’s husband was driving drunk, if her teenage daughter’s sex is good or bad, or whether Barrack Obama’s stepfather taught him to box in Indonesia? Why during an out-sized mass-gathering in Denver, do I have to witness Obama’s two little daughters standing in the spotlight waving like little dolls whose batteries are about to run out? Why should whether John McCain and his wife Cindy are happy be relevant?
“As far as I’m concerned, Sarah Palin’s children might not have sex at all, John McCain could be single and Obama’s children could play at home with their slot cars. They could all be bad husbands or wives, frequent brothels and subsequently lie to their families about it.”
Continuing with our effort to present how the rest of the world is sizing up John McCain’s vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin, this is the latest prognostication by one of Germany’s leading columnists, Thomas Klau.
“We knew from his biography that John McCain was a daredevil: since his childhood days, his mother Roberta assures us, rebellion and risk have been his elixirs of life.”
“With a single stroke last week, McCain demonstrated that his apparent prudence was just a shell, and that his penchant for risk-taking and all-or-nothing gambles would provide the real background music for his presidency.” Read the rest of this entry »
Many observers have been having a grand old time making light of President Elect Barack Obama’s promise to bring a puppy into the White House for his children. I would like to suggest that there is a bit more to this story than throwaway fluff pieces and one-liners for Leno and Letterman. Obama 
Joe and Jane Mullen were never denied a hotel room or turned away at a lunch counter, but both had been the victims of prejudice and that made their commitment to social justice and deep feelings for the disenfranchised all the more real.
