I just watched David Letterman and Barack Obama sit down for the former president’s first interview since leaving office (I may be wrong about this detail) and I am in tears.
For 60 minutes I saw the former president radiate his charisma, his modesty, his sense of humor (often aimed at himself), his brilliant intelligence, and most of all his basic human decency. The show itself was totally different from Letterman’s late night series. Absent was his trademark snarkiness and the doing-it-on-the-fly immediacy of an unedited live interview. Instead the inaugural (I chose that word on purpose) My Next Guest Needs No Introduction episode was an extremely sophisticated piece of work.
It wasn’t just two people talking on a stage. Letterman’s Obama interview was counterpointed with an on-location conversation between the former TV host and Congressman John Lewis as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of the history-making 1965 civil rights march. Period photographs and newsreel footage of the march (much of it showing Lewis as a young man) illustrating their conversation was a reminder of the brutal, blatant attempts to deny American citizens their basic right to participate in a democracy. (A tradition that continues 52 years later in far more subtle ways via bogus charges of voter fraud, registration purges, demands for identification, cutbacks in voting locations, etc. etc. etc.) A letter to the editor in yesterday’s Daily News spoke of Obama’s “eight years of divisive remarks…two disastrous administrations” was indeed, as Obama said it in the interview, “living on a different planet.”
The show was a sharp reminder of how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go in creating a more perfect union. But that’s not what made me cry. It was its very conclusion when a behind-the-scenes camera showed Letterman and Obama in a corridor outside the interview stage. The pair joked about the camera filming them with Obama explaining, tongue-in-cheek the camera person wanted “a shot of us together walking into the sunset, that way they can create this poignant moment.” The pair indeed walked away, not into a sunset but towards a doorway at the end of the corridor.
It wasn’t the moment’s imaginary poignancy that got to me; it was Obama’s self-awareness, expressed in witty terms that reminded me so vividly of the stark (please forgive me) black and white contrast between this man and his successor: the ignorant, bigoted, self-obsessed buffoon, the man who whines about “unfair treatment” and has turned the Oval Office itself into a shithole...it’s enough to make anyone cry.