Five worst quotes we heard last night:
5. New York Times on Grandmama Obama:
"It's pretty amazing to see her as she sorts her corn on the ground."
4. Douchebag local radio interns, heckling Hillary:
"Iron my shirt!"
3. Bill Bennett on John McCain's unlikely comeback:
"Here's a guy who's 71 years old, a guy with broken bones, a guy who can't comb his hair."
2. John McCain, recalling his unlikely comeback strategy:
"I'm goin' to New Hampshire and by gum I'm gunna tell 'em the truth!"
[ed note: we made up the "by gum" part]
1. Tom Brokaw, on the mainstream media's coverage of New Hampshire:
"We got some explaining to do."
Craig's List Alert: Stage Managers Needed
1. Mitt Romney, stepping to the podium microphone: "I just spent 45 minutes writing some very carefully thought out notes on exactly what I want to say. They're right here. But there's no podium, so I'm not gonna use those." Oopsy. But hey, two silvers! He thought of that all by himself!
2. Barack Obama, re-introducing his "Yes We Can" slogan. Beware the white people. Obama patterned his speech on the testifying, call-and-response patterns of a Baptist sermon. Folks, here's how it's supposed to go: Barack says "Yes We Can," you say "Amen." Instead, an audience raised on NASCAR and high school football falls into default-cheerleader mode and just yells whatever he says back at him, really fast, like a hardcore band, totally disrupting Obama's MLK-like flow. The result: a man thrown off his rhythm by his own audience, like when Jay-Z lets Beanie Sigel get on a beat. Let's see if we can get this straight, South Carolina, mmmkay?
Best/Worst Campaign Music Award: John Edwards
Blue Mass Group reports that Desperate Housewives hubby James Denton was in NH canvassing for Edwards yesterday, using Wilco's "Heavy Metal Drummer" as his theme music. How? Why? Is this some kind of in-joke? Which beautiful-and-stoned Denton co-star likes to screw heavy metal drummers? Whatever the answer, it's an altogether better choice than that fucking John Cougar Mellencamp Ford commercial that Edwards is using for his entrance music. We don't care if the Cougar sings it for you or not. The campaign has mercifully excised the tune from the official Youtube clip -- hopefully realizing that there isn't a soul on earth that wants to hear that song ever again.
Worst Gadget
Well, it's better than . . . whatever you call that thing Anderson Cooper was fucking with in Iowa. But CNN's "Magic Wall" worked about as well as you'd expect a giant obnoxious iPhone screen to work. Which is to say: not so well. (For the record, here's how it's supposed to go down.) Hugenormous video touch screen to zoom in on breaking election returns? $30 million. Watching your correspondents poke a TV screen like it's a broke ATM machine? Priceless.