If You Can’t Be Funny at Least You Can Run for President

What is it with George W. Bush? How can he make his scheduled appearance with the quick-witted Jay Leno on NBC tonight after performing so ineptly on CBS last week with the cutting David Letterman?

Do Americans really want someone in the White House who doesn’t have a comedy writer? Or a good one, at least? Do we want a Chief Executive who, when the pressure tightens like a vice, is ad-libless? With not one wisecrack to deploy on behalf of the nation or world peace?

Really, now, can the U.S. trust a president who can’t match Letterman or Leno joke for joke? Imagine what would happen were he confronted by a thorny economic problem or a foreign crisis putting Americans in harm’s way.

Mr. President, we have another hostage crisis, and China has just invaded Taiwan.

Why . . . he’d have nothing funny to say.

Bush is not the only presidential hopeful hitting the late-night talk-show circuit as a way of getting free national exposure and softening up the electorate in a benign environment where everything is comedy.

Also taking part is his opponent, the artist formerly known as John McCain.

Among the more bizarre political phenomena of this age is the assignment of late-night shows as rites of passage for the White House. Most famously, there was candidate Bill Clinton’s national TV debut as a shades-wearing, hip sax man in 1992. Whatever the artistic merits, his renderings of “Heartbreak Hotel” and a bluesy “God Bless This Child” on “The Arsenio Hall Show” sold him to urban blacks and other young viewers in ways that had nothing to do with his ability to govern.

The messengers come and go, but not the delivery method. That’s true regardless of the office being sought, which New York senatorial candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton affirmed when goaded by Letterman into making a Jan. 12 pit stop with the late-show host, who previously had welcomed her opponent, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

And when the stakes are even higher? As the self-mocking Letterman keeps saying, “The road to Washington runs through me.”

As it may through Leno, the irony being that these escapist venues celebrate the qualities of an entertainer, not a national leader. Just as pundit praise in candidate debates almost always goes to the one able to articulate complex ideas simplistically, so do these late-nighters reward glossy camera skills and hair-trigger responses, with the contender who pauses to reflect coming across as a bit foggy or slow-witted.

These same criteria often apply to the full breadth of campaigns, with candidates increasingly going fast and snappy with an electorate bred on news that measures issues and ideas in sound bites.

The emphasis is misplaced and unfortunate. It’s one thing to have the skills to effectively communicate with the nation through TV, quite another to have the skills of a showman. The first is essential in the year 2000, the second is not, and can be a distraction in the White House.

But showmanship can be an attribute on the TV stump, and a prerequisite for being competitive and getting noticed.

Which may be something to ponder regarding the erosion of Bill Bradley’s chances to overtake Vice President Al Gore in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Pundits keep wondering how Bradley can have a message that appears to resonate with so many Democrats and still badly trail an opponent who falls short of omnipotence.

Here is one theory.

Smart and earnest he may be, but Bradley is not the sort of facile candidate who flourishes in the TV era. In hoopspeak, the former New York Knick can’t jump. He is colorless, something he may have gotten away with as presidential fodder in pre-video times, but not now, when our most pervasive medium stresses form and appearance over reflection and analysis.

Bradley speaks slowly and thoughtfully, and when forced to accelerate stammers a bit and appears indecisive. He rarely seems comfortable in front of the camera. Even his body language conveys a certain moldiness, as it did in his televised debate in Los Angeles last week with Gore, who went to showman school in the Clinton administration and conveys more spontaneous zip than Bradley even when his moves are mannered and meticulously choreographed.

So no wonder late-night talk shows--where humor and sleekness mingle lucratively--has become a political stage.

The usual routine is for the candidate to get drilled repeatedly in the late-night host’s monologues, then arrive in person for a whimsical rapprochement, as Gore did last month with Leno, following Bradley by seven months.

Just as this week brings Super Tuesday on the primary circuit, meanwhile, so did last week deliver Super Wednesday on the late-night circuit, when a pumped-up McCain visited “The Tonight Show” in Los Angeles--doing a Leno impression while quipping his way across nine minutes--as Bush gave the kind of show with Letterman, via satellite from St. Louis, that a producer would close after one night.

McCain’s schmoozing with Leno was ironic given the candidate’s frequent criticism of Hollywood and advocacy of TV reform as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. And ironic, too, because the outcome of this Bush-McCain duel across the airwaves was the reverse of what would occur the next night during a televised debate from Los Angeles when, substance aside, Bush clearly was smoother and more energized than McCain, who this time was the one beaming in by satellite.

McCain’s “Tonight Show” shot was classic for late night, with the candidate getting his bonus minutes of fame only after Leno had finished with a young TV star. But what did McCain care? For all you could tell that night, show biz was his life.

But it wasn’t Bush’s.

“Does he know that I said he was a boob?” Letterman wondered aloud prior to making Bush his pin cushion for six minutes. What followed was excruciating.

Letterman: “How do you look so youthful and rested?”

Bush: “Fake it.”

Letterman: “And that’s pretty much how you’re gonna run the country?”

Bush’s prepared lines were clunkers, and the interview all but went blotto when Letterman, who recently came though quintuple bypass surgery, asked the governor what he meant when claiming to be “a uniter, not a divider.”

Bush: “That means when it comes time to sew up your chest, we use stitches instead of opening it up, is what that means.”

Letterman’s quizzical expression and the studio audience’s moans told you that if Bush were there he might have been pelted with tomatoes. Afterward, Letterman mentioned that Bush would be with Leno tonight, then twisted the knife: “There’s a real summit meeting.”

McCain backers hope that Bush’s flop as a comedian will be seen as proof of his incompetence to be president. Even better, he’ll never host a late-night show.

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.