The Daily Show: A Quite Week

The week of April 14th, 2008 has been a quiet week in terms of election news, but the Daily Show did cover Obama's recent infamous comment about the personality of western Pennsylvania.

Stewart opens the segment by saying that it is almost a mathematical certainty that Obama will go into the convention with more votes and more delegates, non super, than Hillary Clinton. And then he frames the recording of Obama by saying that it would take,

Some sort of egregious, self inflicted, undiplomatic, poorly recorded semi-truth by Obama.

He then plays a rather long clip of Obama's radio recorded voice saying,

You go into some of those small towns in Pennsylvania...the jobs have been gone
now for 25 years...they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy
to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment...

Jon Stewart, with his sarcastic and witty comments responds to this quote by saying that it is "Outrageous" because the people of Western PA don't turn to God and guns and mistrust of foreigners because of a downturn in the economy, rather it is the heart and soul of what they are made of. Essentially Stewart is agreeing with Obama's statement, and then he goes even further and says that he would hope that his president was elite or better than him, purposely changing the connotation that the word "elite" has in the American political sphere.

Stewart then plays clips from numerous different mainstream news stations that clearly misquote, misinterpret and exaggerate Obama's statement rather unfairly (they do this to Hillary's words all the time). Although it is frustrating to see Stewart blatantly support Obama, I commend him on trying to present a different frame, especially since the media is blatantly taking Obama's sentiment too far.

It is frustrating though when seconds later he played short clips of Hillary and tries to make her look untrustworthy and insincere. It is the first time that Stewart has clearly taken sides on the Democratic election although the past month has seen him becoming increasingly more favorable to Obama.