The Daily Show: Barack's Bowling for Votes

The Pennsylvania primary is coming up in a little less than month, and Barack is moving around the state connecting with the 'Reagan Democratics' according to the Daily Show on April 1st, 2008. The Daily Show has consistantly gotten more and more openly in favor of Obama, I wonder if this has anything with the writers coming back? Impossible to say. But it would be interesting to know the gender rundown of The Daily Show's writers. That is not to say that the gender of the writers is directly in correlation to which candidate they support, although it is a possibility, but regardless it would be an interesting fact to know.

Anyways, in this episode Jon Stewart blatantly makes fun of the mainstream media's rather ridiculous framing of Barack Obama's gutterball while bowling in PA. He shows clips of the media framing this in terms of his masculinity, as well as undercurrents of racism, for example one anchor says something along the lines of, "He should stick to basketball". Stewart takes great delight in pointing out that Barack's bowling skills don't have any bearing on his ability to lead the country.

Although the show has been rather biased lately in favor of Obama, I commend the show for also making fun of the media's opinion that Hillary is hurting the democratic party by not dropping out. He played clips from at least 6 different mainstream nightly news shows that all were implying that Hillary should drop out of the race by a certain date because she is hurting the democratic party. It was funny because although all the clips had the same frame they had vastly different dates of when she should drop out by. Stewart says something to the effect of, "Oh no, there's too much democracy".




This episode was full of information on the upcoming 2008 Presidential election! Stewart also had one of his correspondants interview a 21 year old college student who also happens to be a super delegate. It was very interesting, but I wish they would have framed it differently. Instead of focusing on how cool it is for a young person to be involved in the democratic process of our country, they framed it in the sense that he wasn't representative of American youth (example, he like to listen to Celion Dion and his favorite movie was Love Actually). I wish they would have given more background; I would have liked to know how he got chosen to be a super delegate. It was nice though that the show took a tiny bit of time to talk about what a super delegate was, though the information they imparted about that was weak at best. This episode also had all men.