Okay, so the primaries wound up today, Obama got the nomination, which basically everyone knew for awhile. Normally, I wouldn’t bother noticing such a non-event. However, tonight I managed to catch /The Daily Show/ discussing the event, and two things really stuck out:

(1) Terry McAuliffe. Stewart started out showing a bunch of clips of him, going absolutely nuts with enthusiasm for Hillary, even with her impending defeat. As Stewart is making fun of him, the camera pans and there McAuliffe is, sitting right next to each other. They start seemingly pointless chit-chat, but by the time it’s over you realize that Stewart, with some very gentle jokes, has gotten McAuliffe to admit he’s a complete phony with respect to his enthusiasm for Hillary (since it was filmed around 6:00, McAuliffe was still halfway keeping up the act). Such phoniness is entirely typical of campaign people these days, but it was a treat to see it gotten out in the open so skillfully.

(2) They had this sketch where they brought in their new junior correspondent to talk about the campaign. He very quickly went to how boring it is, how /Lost/ was much more interesting. The obvious joke was about youth apathy and how much we insist on being entertained. I have another way of reading it: the campaign really was boring, and that made it not worth paying attention to. Here’s the funny thing, though: it wasn’t boring because you had a bunch of professors with limited public speaking skills dominating the coverage, dissecting policy minutiae no one cared about. It was boring because you had a bunch of journalists with limited thinking skills dominating the coverage, dissecting bullshit politics-for-politics’ sake minutiae that no one cared about, at least not after the first story on the same three themes that got discussed ad nauseum. We were told about horse-race journalism. But horse-races aren’t that boring. We were told about infotainment. But damn it, not only was the media short on info, it wasn’t even that entertaining to watch.