The (Fairly Serious) Case for Jon Stewart in 2024
politico.com
politico.com
@jonstewart: Ummm…No thank you
I went to a taping of the Daily Show in 2010 and before he came out for the Q&A, the emcee opened with "no, he's not running for president so don't waste your question asking". That's how often he got that question.
because biden- and almost every other recent president – have been politicians for decades, then yet still get nothing done.
John Stewart, at least has the truck record of being able to deeply research issues and find and stand for his moral ground in a consistent, predictable manner
I wouldn't trust him to " run the country" by himself. but I also don't think you need to be able to do that to be president. John Kennedy in a 1960s filled his kitchen cabinet full of highly intelligent people to help him govern. as a counterexample, George w. Bush was rather unintelligent, but filled his cabinet full of insanely intelligent( but evil ) and was highly effective in pursuing his agenda
If nothing else, John Stewart would be moral compass for the country
to preempt somebody jumping in on this with a dumb take on Trump: he accomplished rather little as a president, certainly far less than he could have, because he filled his cabinet with blithering yes men, Rather than a cohesive team that could strategize
It's super easy to say something facile but funny about a subject and to clown around with rage when you don't have to actually do anything about it. I think he's said himself when challenged that it's just comedy and he's just a comedian.
it's very analogous to empiricism in research. I wouldn't trust him to get the right answer on his own, nor on the first time. but, I'd trust him, that it put up the the task on the issue of governance, he wouldn't be arrogant enough to assume he knows the only right way to do something, and hed actually try to sorround himself by intelligent capable people, and rely on their advice to get things done
This is something touched on with Bush Jr.’s Decision Points. The president has so many things to handle that they end up having little time to truly delve deep into the problem and wind up delegating most of that to their staff. It was a meme when Bush said he was “the decider”, but it’s very accurate.
I agree that his cabinet was a mess, but he also had a firmly GOP congress his first two years that gave him incredible backing and they passed a fair amount of legislation because congressional GOP leadership are very organized.
Now that the GOP controls the Supreme Court and quite likely will control congress in the next cycle, the next Republican president is going to have an unprecedented amount of power.
essentially, I believe almost any other person other than him could have accomplished more towards the Republican agenda than he did. it's almost unprecedented how little he did in spite of the power the Republicans had in 2016.
And, as you say, he has been a politician for decades. He should know this.
Unless... is it possible that he's smart? Is he pandering to the liberal wing of his own party, throwing out ideas that he knows are extreme and not good policy, and then letting them die in Congress?
Or is he trying to shine a spotlight on Manchin and Systema, and get them primaried?
All in all, I don't understand his strategy. It seems to not work very well, and it seems that he should know better.
Instead we should focus on electing good people to congress. The president should be irrelevant mostly if a congress is competent and can work together. Even if a president turns out to be a psycho congress can veto prof bills and pass them.
I agree that we need to fix congress and also break the duopoly strangling it with swings from one extreme to another.
The president is supposed to be an administrator executing the laws passed by co guess. They are rhe head of state in I ternarional affairs but without the authority to make binding agreeme to for the country. They are the head of the military responsible for defending the county but are not able to attack other countries without the approval of congress. At least, that's how it's supposed to be.
Only congress can save this country, and that should terrify everyone.
The whole point of Monarchy is that you get random monarchs because of how sexual reproduction works. Short, stupid, clumsy, more or less everything is possible. England even had rules trying to pick boys to be the next monarch (these rules are no longer in effect for future generations) and because Mother Nature doesn't give a shit we got several Queens anyway. So elections have nothing to do with how somebody gets to be King.
Anyway, I think the role you're thinking about is Head of the Executive. You need a single human in this role for effective government, because the executive is responsible for immediate tactical responses and of necessity a democratic legislature cannot react fast enough or cohesively enough to serve this purpose.
It does you no good to give, say, Nancy Pelosi the status of "Commander in Chief" of your military forces, and then oblige her to hold a vote, subject to the whims of dozens or hundreds of people, on any directives for those forces. The Executive needs to make rapid tactical decisions and not be paralysed by conflicting political ambitions. This is also true for civil emergencies, nobody whose town was just destroyed by a volcano wants to hear about how due to procedural rules the emergency supplies won't arrive until Wednesday because a senator from another state wanted to make a broader point about gay marriage.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/05/john-oliver-not...
Stewart’s constant “I’m just a comedian” response has prompted pushback from his detractors who have called it, among other things, a “dodge.”
Much as people with overly inflated egos are wont to do at any expression of either modesty or humility, or a bully is wont to that a victim would dare defang their attacks, depriving them of the dopamine hit they get when someone squirms under their finger.
Yes, "best practice" is to not undermine yourself in a debate with that sort of utterance, but today, I feel it is an invaluable expression of truth, and a reminder to the American people that even your President is just a normal bloke onto whom a shit ton of responsibility and accountability gets dumped for 4 years.
This country is a country of cobblers, haberdashers, construction workers, office workers, garbage men, and yes, comedians. I think it's about time that the political elite start to recall that "politician" was never intended to be a day job.
i generally think of rogan as anti-establishment center left tho?
That doesn't make him well suited to be president though. He supports policies and positions that differ little form those leading us to our current predicament.
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/presidents-ranked-worst-bes...
were those times good because of what the Fed had done at the beginning of the decade? were they good because of the previous president's policy? were they good because of Reagan's policy?
Good things? Well of course it depends on who you ask.
But celebrity outsiders are far better at speaking truth to power and challenging the calcified establishment. Things will happen for sure.
it's from this cloth of shadows. we can infer his political beliefs and projector own. but he very well. could be a neoliberal hack who blindly trusts in his party, like Biden
So, I don't think Biden is exactly a hack but I do think he is a status-quo guy who doesn't understand when a long-term predictable plan makes him a sitting duck.
On the other hand, Jon does have to make a case for pretty much _any_ political expertise outside of punditry. I'd like to give him a chance sooner than any Republican.
The political press has been telling us how badly the country is run for years; perhaps they can finally get a member of their corps elected and fix all the problems.
I don't think the Democrats need a presidential candidate at the moment. I think they're hunting for a VP to appoint right now, before they bail on Joe. Investigation into the Biden family operations will kick up too much evidence against other party leaders.
Additionally, if something happened to the VP nominee between election and taking office, wouldn't the President-Elect choose a new VP without going through an election?
Ballots are locked for a certain period of days before an election.
The presidential candidate chooses their running mate and are voted on together. Until the early 1800's, the winning presidential candidate became president and the runner-up became VP. This didn't work out very well because the VP sometimes came from the opposing party.
If a sitting VP leaves office prematurely, then Congress votes on the replacement. I assume that would also be the case in a VP-elect situation.
In that case a new VP is indeed appointed (but must be approved by Congress).
They actually do, Biden has one big con; age. He will be 81 in 2024. He already has very low approval rating and with recession looking more realistic, they're going to need to have contingencies.
Democrats are horrible at planning things in advance, this is where Republicans beat them.
I still think they are better than Dems in this area.
Just look at how they managed their goals with the justice system, starting with the Supreme Court. They don’t care about Trump that much because POTUS last either 4 or 8 years. Supreme Court, gerrymandering election maps, and so in outlast any POTUS picks.
Yes, politics has always been contentious, but Jon Stewart popularized the format of taking a subject and reducing it to a very narrow aspect, mocking it, and associating audience applause with “winning”.
Again, this is speculation on my part so I can’t give you a source or citation, but the kind of ‘clap back’ responses I read on Twitter seem inspired by how the Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver approach covering politics. Take a complex subject, find a flaw or make a non-sequitur joke, and use that to discredit the other side through humiliation.
It’s good entertainment, but it does not make for good discourse and it is incredibly polarizing.
This has been the format of politics since at least democracy in ancient Athens.
They're responsible for the problem and decline of discourse. The most you can say about Stewart is that he made it funny. I agree he shouldn't run for office, I just don't think he's responsible for the snide discourse.
That was 100% earned by politicians who brought clowns like Palin and Trump to the forefront.
I enjoyed The Daily Show, but political satire has been popular for as long as politics has been a thing.
“The oldest example that has survived till today is Aristophanes. In his time satire targeted top politicians, like Cleon, and religion, at the time headed by Zeus. ‘Satire and derision progressively attacked even the fundamental and most sacred facts of faith’…”
[citation required]
I never claimed he discovered something brand new.
[citation required]
Political talk shows are one thing, but basing the show around comedy-first was the key. You can’t just claim that because talking on television about politics existed long before the daily show means the daily show did nothing innovative or that it didn’t popularize anything.
They might have just been riding the wave, but the changing temperature of political discourse was certainly on display in the changing tone of that show. Maybe all the tape of cable news they had to pour through over the years rotted their brain despite watching it with a critical eye.
There were two big shifts over the years. I watched when it was goofing around in a news format, when it was pointed, and when it became salty I eventually stopped watching.
The pointed period was it's golden period and it's rise in fame. They poked fun at the tricks of the tv news establishment and put egg on politician's faces. It was obvious they had a perspective, but it didn't seem like they were sacrificing comedy to send a message. ...and then some years later they blatantly were.
The time I realized I was done with the show was when I read some news during the day, and a politician said basically: "A, but B, therefore C." That night on The Daily Show, they played a clip of A, cut to Stewart at the desk to double down on point A, cut to a clip of C, smash cut to Stewart pulling a face and pause for reaction. The Daily Show used to be the ones to clown on CNN for doing exactly that.
Would the Daily Show of today or Last Week Tonight give me the same soft spot for Ron Paul getting ratfucked by the cable news media? The Daily Show of 15 years ago didn't want him in power but still celebrated him on the occasions he made decent political points that neither the GOP or dems wanted to touch with a 10 foot pole, and exposed how his campaign was under- and mis-reported. These days? They'd ratfuck him even harder than cable news.