COMMENTARY | President Obama and the main members of his braintrust, such as David Axelrod and David Plouffe, might never think of taking campaign advice from Comedy Central's fake newsman, Jon Stewart. For that matter, Obama might think little of the 1990s campaigns of Ross Perot. But the president just might be able to reverse his sagging popularity if he would incorporate some lessons from these two disparate people.
Let's start with Perot. He had the right idea when he flanked himself with visuals. His problem was that he wasn't good at it. His graphs were too complicated, and he went too fast in explanations. Furthermore, he lacked virtually any sense of irony of humor.
Stewart, in contrast, knows how to use the visuals that appear at his right-hand side. He has made his living with various askance reactions to the information that is displayed or to people making stupid statements. I don't mean to suggest that Obama should consider becoming another Jon Stewart. A politician couldn't (and shouldn't) get away with cut-up jokes, much less R-rated profanity.
Still, Barack Obama could make use of some milder humor, or irony, joined with simple graphic illustrations of key facts. In a recent example on The Daily Show, Stewart did a spinoff on Warren Buffett's assertions that rich people such as himself should accept higher taxes, and the hostile conservative reactions.
Liberal audience members laughed at what they considered inane remarks by Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and various Fox News commentators, but also Stewart cited, and illustrated, more facts than are normally found in an Obama speech or in a cable news chat show.
Stewart deftly illustrated that low- and low-middle income people in the "bottom 50 percent" of income, are the combined owners of only 2.5 percent of the national wealth, amounting to $1.45 trillion dollars, demonstrating that the U.S. is similar to a Third World country in terms of income inequality. In contrast, by rejecting Obama's proposal to restore a few percentage points on the top tax rate back to 1990s levels, Republicans are rejecting nearly half of that total, or $700 billion.
In the process, Stewart pressed the "balanced approach" case far more effectively than Obama and his minions have done. Perhaps they could find a serious example from a comedian's presentation, and from his creative use of a side screen rather than a teleprompter.
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