Back in February, Saturday Night did a peppery parody of a CNN televised debate in which it painted the press as fawning all over Democratic Senator Barack Obama and dismissing and being hard on Senator Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s campaign and Clinton herself pointed to that parody in their argument that the press was going easy on Obama and part of “Obamanamia” and hadn’t been vetting or challenging him.
Shortly after that, what many believe was Obama’s “free” ride indeed ended — and some pundits attributed it to the SNL sketch and the Clinton campaigns use of it as an example of how it wasn’t only them that had this perception of the press’ behavior.
Obama supporters charged SNL was repeatedly biased in its parodies in favor of Clinton and skewering their candidate — and Dan Abrams on MSNBC noted in a segment that political supporters were going haywire…and that SNL was a political candidate equal offender (click on the link since he includes various excerpts).
The Clinton campaign loved SNL — but it’s likely the love affair is over now with last night’s latest parody which at times seems downright brutal.
[Video is after the jump below]
The devastating spoof of a Clinton speech is likely to upset the campaign and even spark supporters’ letters and emails of protest to the show. This You Tube is now being quickly posted on various websites. WARNING: It will be offensive to Clinton supporters but parodies, satires and late night comedian jokes often reflect growing conventional wisdom — which may or may not be correct and which change gears quickly.
The danger to Clinton: political humor bombs if it doesn’t gets laughs from an audience that shares some assumptions. If this is getting big laughs out there, it means Superdelegates are picking up some of these perceptions as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0e5O0aBrOU&eurl=http://thepage.time.com/P.S. We were going to post the famous February debate parody but it seems to have been pulled from You Tube.
UPDATE: Allahpundit: “If she’s lost SNL, she’s lost America.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.