"The worst Super Bowl party ever": Should the White House switch its policy-making apparatus to Dave's Law?

by Ken

I watched about 10 minutes of the Super Bowl (about when the Saints came back from their 10-0 deficit to take the lead), and it mostly served to remind me why I took this season off from football. (It's gonna be a tough call when training camps open in the summer to see whether I can get it up for the Giants' uphill battle to match this season's 8-8 record.) Later I had to make a trip to the supermarket before it closed, and they had the radio feed on, but that was easy enough to ignore.

I bring this up only to explain how it happened that I didn't see the Letterman spot. I've caught up to it, and I think it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. I just keep hitting that YouTube "Replay" button.

Tom Shales has the story behind the story in his WaPo column today:

The spot, which aired in the second quarter, opened with Letterman sitting on a couch, eating chips and watching TV. The camera pulled back to reveal two companions watching with Dave: Oprah Winfrey, who appeared in a similar spot in 2007, and the totally unexpected Jay Leno, Letterman's rival since Leno snatched NBC's "Tonight Show" out from under him in 1992.

"This is the worst Super Bowl party ever," Letterman says. "You're just saying that because I'm here," Leno counters. Viewers had to be wondering if their eyes deceived them -- why would Leno and Letterman be appearing together? -- and if the whole thing was some diabolical computer-generated trick.

Letterman himself dreamed up the spot and wrote it, according to Rob Burnett, president of Letterman's Worldwide Pants production company. "Dave is ruled by one law," Burnett said from the Super Bowl. "Is it funny? And if it's funny, let's do it." The notion of having an NBC star on CBS air was cleared by CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves, executives at NBC, and Leno, who when contacted by Dave's people, agreed immediately, reportedly telling a Letterman staffer, "This is what show business should be."

The spot was taped Tuesday night in the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway, where Letterman's show is performed. Winfrey was smuggled in unnoticed and Leno arrived in a disguise that included dark glasses and a fake mustache. "We were desperate to keep this a secret," Burnett said. "All three of them were professional, friendly and cordial for the 28 minutes or so that it took to do the spot."

"Everybody wins in this," Burnett said -- partly because all three performers, especially Leno and Letterman, who've been sniping at each other in recent monologues on their shows -- come off looking like good sports.

I wonder whether the Obama White House would benefit from adopting Dave's Law ("Is it funny?") for its policy- and decision-making process. I know this isn't an approach you'd want to see taught in civics classes, but it could hardly produce much worse results than whatever the hell process it is Master Rahm is using now.

SPEAKING OF THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE

Have you heard about Financial Times reporter Edward Luce's piece, "A fearsome foursome"? (There may be a link somewhere that will take you directly to the piece, but if you've already used up your one free hit per month, this one requires that you be registered on ft.com. It doesn't cost anything to register, though, and that bumps you up to 10 free articles per month.)

Luce set out to discover "what went wrong?" in year one of the Obama adminstration that left the president at the helm of "a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington's ways"

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons - from Mr Obama's decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president's inability to convince voters he can "feel their [economic] pain", to the apparent ungovernability of today's Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis - and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington - most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office - each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people - Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.

As a colleague points out, this tight loop doesn't account for the White House economic axis of Larry Summers and Timmy Geithner. You get the feeling that they don't have to worry about having their input filtered through Master Rahm. Nevertheless, for those of us who have been wondering how the administration got so seriously off course. Digby has already been here, and Howie will have more to say about the Luce piece, with particular reference to Master Rahm, in the morning.

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