I didn't see Saturday Night Live last night but a friend who did and who lives in Los Angeles told me that for no visible reason, the last half-hour of the show didn't air and in its place was a half-hour "town meeting" with Joe Lieberman. This is the real Joe Lieberman, not Darrell Hammond in make-up, and a real town meeting, not a sketch. This struck me as so odd that I scanned the Internet and found this article. Here's an excerpt talking about Cassandra Lentchner, a lawyer who works for Lieberman…
In December, Lentchner found out that Al Sharpton would appear on Saturday Night Live. She dove into the federal equal-time rules and found that in states in which both candidates were on the ballot, Lieberman was entitled to exactly what Sharpton got — 28 minutes of free air time on certain NBC affiliates. She cut a deal for reruns of a Lieberman town meeting to air in media markets in California and Missouri.
I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere else online but that's bizarre…to just dump out of an episode of a network show (even a rerun) and run a half-hour of something like that in a major market like Los Angeles. My friend who saw it reported also that it was poorly shot and didn't make Lieberman look especially good, either.
This of course raises the question of why no other candidate has received the same "equal time." Perhaps some of them still will. Kerry, Clark, Edwards and Dean might feel it would do them more harm than good with public sentiment, but they might not. More to the point, Lyndon LaRouche is on the ballot in California and he always seems to love TV airtime, and it's not like Dennis Kucinich has much to lose. Gephardt and Braun have shut down their campaigns but they're still on the ballot and might be able to claim the airtime. It wouldn't surprise me, by the way, if Gephardt (out of the race) still got more votes in California than Lieberman (still in).
One might also wonder if this will make Saturday Night Live less inclined to let real politicians host the show during an election year. Maybe if it doesn't, that's not a bad thing. Based on the last time I saw the show, the town meeting with Lieberman might have been funnier than the real last half hour of SNL.