On the eve of an election that both parties are calling the most important in the country’s history, it’s clear who the late-night TV hosts are stirring the pot for.
“Late Show” host Stephen Colbert had a friendly conversation Monday with Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, the high school football coach who was trying to help his teammate Kamala Harris to the goal line.
If you liked this metaphor, you’ll love Colbert’s interview with Walz, who tried to explain Harris’ economic plan the way an auto mechanic might describe your car’s engine problem.
“So your car is running a little rough, it’s still running but there are things you can do,” Walz said, sitting at a table at Johnson Hall Cafe in Pennsylvania’s important Bucks County district. “Now, if it’s an older car, you can clean the carburetor on it. You can invest money in a really important piece, for example the carburetor, being middle-class. You’ve invested a little bit in this carburetor. The whole car is running better. This brings oxygen to The entire system.
“So you have to invest in the middle class… The middle class makes everything else work,” he added.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Waltz interview if there wasn’t also a sports metaphor.
“We know we’re in the last two minutes of this game,” he told Colbert. “We will give 110% of our efforts, and we know that we have to leave it on the field, because democracy is at stake here.”
Meanwhile, Jimmy Kimmel struck a darker and more ominous tone on election eve. Host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Drawing attention to audio tapes published by The Daily Beast over the weekend in which Jeffrey Epstein, the prominent businessman who committed suicide while awaiting trial on child sex trafficking charges, tells author Michael Wolff that he was Donald Trump’s best friend for 10 years. .
Kimmel said he was shocked that Epstein’s comments about Trump, which were recorded two years before Epstein was found dead in his prison cell in 2019, had attracted so little attention.
“Do you remember that Mitt Romney fell because he put a dog carrier on the roof of his car? “We just got a hundred hours of Jeffrey Epstein saying that he and Trump are good friends,” Kimmel said. “I didn’t even get an alert about it on my phone. I didn’t get any texts about it.”
Kimmel added: “Do you know what kind of lowly life you have to have for Jeffrey Epstein to say you have no moral compass? It’s as if R. Kelly got mad at you because you left the toilet seat open.
Mark Shanahan can be reached at mark.shanahan@globe.com. Follow him @markshanahan.
