Ho-hum, the guest’s another candidate

“My first guest tonight is a candidate for president of the United States . . . “ is a refrain already echoing across the late-night talk show battlefield.

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, who, The Times reported, is eyeing a “Tonight Show” appearance to coincide with his initial, official foray into the race.

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 Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s appearance Thursday night on “The Late Show With David Letterman” -- a ho-hum-ness that suggests both how neutralized these spots have become and how adept the candidates are at this particular ritual of the trail.

The narrative on Clinton is that she’s a highly intelligent Machiavellian without hobbies; while her husband made talk show history with his saxophone, you can’t imagine seeing her play the flute or cello having the same effect.

As the dean of late-night inquisitors, Letterman is particularly arch and counterintuitive, 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. That seem about right?”

“I sure hope not,” she said to Letterman’s Iraq question, then ticked off her Iraq platform -- withdraw troops, pressure the Iraqi government, increase diplomacy in the region -- having already skated through Letterman’s question about the tens of millions it takes to run for president while her own campaign finds itself ensnared in headlines about contributor Norman Hsu, taken to jail Friday on an outstanding warrant dating to a 1992 grand larceny case.

Clinton’s instrument is her drive, and on Letterman she played what amounted to a 20-minute solo. She reminded Letterman of the jokes he’s made about her pantsuits and said of becoming the first woman president: “I think it’s a good barrier for America to break.”

But another barrier has already fallen -- the one that used to make a candidate’s trip to the late-night couch feel at least a little dangerous.

You can’t run for president anymore without being as good at late-night repertory as, say, Don Rickles (and in a bizarro quirk of scheduling, Rickles was the guest over on PBS’ “Charlie Rose” the same hour Clinton was on Dave).

Obama on Stewart last week yielded the same sort of TV non-event, though if you projected hard enough you might have detected Stewart giving Obama his endorsement.

Theoretically, anyway, it was significant; where once a candidate’s late-night talk show appearance teased at a culture clash, a generational disconnect, the Obama appearance on Stewart had the atmosphere of what meshes, thematically and otherwise, about Obama’s candidacy and Stewart’s show.

A candidate of mixed-race parentage who’s lived around the world, who attended the Ivy League bastion Harvard and has, as establishment Washington experience goes, the kind of newbie résumé college grads fax from Kinko’s -- that sounds about right for the kind of candidate “The Daily Show” demo would produce.

Maybe that’s why the most interesting candidate-guest these days is Mike Huckabee, the GOP dark horse who has already done both Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” and HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” three times.

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 in the land?”

“Look, I’m gonna go on the side that there’s a creator behind it,” Huckabee finally said.

Huckabee is an unlikely presence in this iconoclastic realm and he no doubt knows it.

Sitting there amiably or awkwardly bringing a joke, he’s like a stranger in a strange land willing to try the local cuisine. After his surprising second in the Iowa straw poll, he seems intent on taking over McCain’s role as GOP crossover comedy star. He’s the quintessential modern-media presidential hopeful -- that guy you saw on Colbert.

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paul.brownfield@latimes.com

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