Usually it’s best to give things like this little public spat between Jon Stewart and Rick Santelli/Jim Cramer/Joe Scarborough a little time to settle before trying to figure it all out, but in this case the respective positions are already glaringly clear. Cramer, Scarborough and their ilk are very scared because they see the world in which they became rich and famous shifting beneath their feet; Stewart exposing their rank hypocrisies is the last thing they want right now. As frightened people are often wont to do, they’re lashing out as loudly as possible, hoping that the volume of their voices distracts the audience from just how nakedly feeble they really are.
First, let’s review. On Wednesday of last week, The Daily Show did an eight minute segment highlighting the relentlessly upbeat clown show that is CNBC. They mocked Santelli’s populist posing, Cramer’s track record of recommending soon-to-fail companies, and showcased interviews with disastrously incompetent and dishonest executives that rose to the intellectual level of fellatio. Stewart concluded the segment with a hearty and well deserved “fuck you”.
The segment was an instant hit, being picked up by numerous media outlets (including The New York Times on Sunday and Monday) and spreading all over what Stewart would call on his March 9th show the “twitscape”. Cramer, an attention whore in the old style, responded with an incoherent diatribe on MainStreet.com. He writes, “I do favor almost all of Obama’s agenda, right down to having the rich pay more of their freight in this great country” but then proceeds to rant against bank “nationalization” and demand that Obama re-inflate the housing bubble (“We need to stop house-price depreciation.”) Cramer is smart enough to see the fairyland of financial make believe crumbling around him, but instead of recognizing that it was all a dream he wants Obama to wave a magic wand so that he can go back to Bull Castle in the Enchanted Forest of Housing Appreciation.
Stewart came back on Monday, using devastating video clips to savage Cramer’s claim that it was just an “urban legend” that he was telling people to buy Bear Stearns right before it collapsed. Tuesday morning Cramer went on The Today Show where he treated the entire world to the image of him staring blankly into a camera while they played Stewart’s clip from the previous night; watching his reaction is just short of painful. He looks like a child that has been hauled into the principal’s office and forced to listen while his stupidities are recounted. His only response is to shrug his shoulders, flap his arms, call Stewart’s program a “comedy show” (as if that’s supposed to hurt his credibility) and stand there, a defeated man.
Things might have ended there. Instead, Cramer showed up thirty minutes later on Morning Joe, the MSNBC morning show that puts the lie to anyone claiming that it’s a “liberal” cable network. Joe Scarborough proceeded to lay into Stewart for basically being a liberal cheap shot artist. (Cramer, for his part, appeared slightly chastised telling Scarborough, “I think you ought to lighten up”.) This necessitated another response from The Daily Show.
Last night, Stewart came on to gleefully answer “Yes” to Scarborough’s misguided charge that “is [Stewart] gonna just sit there and cherry pick over the past eight years every mistake people make.” That is exactly what The Daily Show does, it doesn’t participate in your silly and ephemeral debate; it mocks you for having anything to do with something so demonstrably foolish. Scarborough is, in effect, accusing Stewart of doing his job. That’s pretty pitiful in and of itself, but he’s making his statement from a perch of smug self righteousness that is almost incomprehensibly ignorant and naive. It’s match point to Stewart and The Daily Show though when they had Dora the Explorer patiently explain, “Doesn’t Jim Cramer understand it’s not about individual mistakes he’s made, it’s about him creating a false sense of urgency that helped hyper-inflate the bubble.”
The deeper point here is that guys like Santelli, Cramer and Scarborough are on their way out and this little spat is proof. Only people who are utterly ignorant of the wider world would ever deliberately get into a media war with a highly rated, well respected, critically acclaimed national television show that relentlessly parodies other media outlets. Let’s not forget that Jon Stewart did more than any other single person to get CNN’s Crossfire taken off the air; and all he had to do was appear as a guest and expose it as the pointless, ignorant numbskullery it was.
The real fear for the cable blowhards, of both the money and political variety, is that the world that takes shape after this crisis passes will be one where guys like them are marginalized. Cramer gets people to watch his television show and buy his books because there are a lot of people out there who think “the markets” are a carnival game where the house loses, and Cramer is nothing if not an enthusiastic barker. Scarborough similarly operates by putting out books and appearing on television, only instead of pumping stocks he’s selling increasingly unpopular and discredited right wing talking points. They’re both cheerleaders and they’re accustomed to living in a world where the Dow rises and Republicans win while they stand on the sideline chanting and dancing. But the crowd has stopped responding (no matter how much leg they show) and they don’t know what to do.
A world where the economy has been saved by the Democrats and the market isn’t seen as a casino is a world where the audience for people like Cramer and Scarborough is much smaller. There will always be money bunnies and cranky pundits, but the halcyon days are over and that realization must be a cold one indeed for men like them. On the other side, Stewart and his kind will never go out of business because satire never goes out of style and every court needs a jester. That’s why this fight was so lopsided; Santelli, Cramer, Scarborough and those they represent are clinging to an old order that, however much fun it was for some, didn’t make any fundamental sense. Stewart is pointing out their nakedness, but he isn’t the reason they’re not wearing clothes.
