You have to give Lorne Michaels and the rest of the folks at SNL credit: they’ve done a really good job with this election season. They haven’t pulled their punches—in fact, at points, they’ve showed more willingness to tell the truth than the reporters whose job it is to do so; the skit they did on the bailout is perhaps the most obvious example of that, since it was so blunt that NBC felt the need to edit it:
Here’s the edited version, which is still quite good:
The one that really got me, though, was their skit of the first presidential debate where they had Obama insisting that under his plan “most members of the Chicago city council, as well as city building inspectors” would get a tax cut “because my plan would not tax income from bribes, kickbacks, shakedowns, embezzlement of government funds, or extortion.” I suppose they figured since their McCain followed that with a non sequitur, it was okay, but I still find it hard to believe they actually put that in there.In line with this, I thought they handled Sarah Palin’s appearance quite well. It posed some interesting challenges for Lorne Michaels, as he noted in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, but they rose to the occasion. They didn’t hand her anything, but they let her play to her strengths, and I think both she and the show benefited as a result. The way they handled the open was, I think, particularly interesting:
To be sure, Gov. Palin has actually been talking to the press a fair bit lately, but that’s fine; as Michaels says, SNL deals with perception, not reality, and the McCain campaign’s early folly in sequestering her (courtesy of Rick Davis, who should have been booted all the way out when Steve Schmidt came on board) created this perception. She now has to deal with it in turn—which SNL helped her do. Credit to them.