“You ran on very high rhetoric, hope and change, and the Democrats this year seem to be running on, ‘Please baby, one more chance,’ ’’ Stewart quipped to Obama, chiding him for – if anything – a presidency too “timid” as Obama used the interview to plead with his supporters to vote. At another, he wondered aloud whether Mr. Obama had traded the audacity of 2008 for pragmatism in 2010, offering a platform of “Yes we can, given certain conditions.” 
 
 Mr. Obama paused for a moment. Serious thoughts about Saturday's gathering (which Stewart is co-hosting with his colleague Stephen Colbert of "The Colbert Report") only invite more quasi-intellectual disaster. “He’s a great comedian extending his work to another stage.” 
 
 “He knows what he does for a living,” O’Donnell said.
– Critics are predictably split on President Obama's much-hyped Daily Show appearance last night, but no one seems to think he single-handedly saved—or doomed—Democrats: Though Jon Stewart and Obama are both funny in their own ways, they managed "to not be very funny together for the show's entire 22 minutes," writes Hank Stuever in the Washington Post. "Obama seemed resiliently cool as ever, ready-made for just about anything one can do on television ... But that anything—a surprise moment, or a difficult question, or a failed attempt at humor—never quite arrived." Also in the Post, Dana Milbank weighs in: "As in his MTV appearance a couple of weeks ago, Obama didn't try to connect with his youthful audience. He was serious and defensive," and even had "a Brownie moment" when he insisted that "Larry Summers did a heckuva job." But at least "Obama has been willing to bring his presidential platform to settings his predecessors might have regarded as unconventional, to say the least," writes Sheryl Gay Stolberg in the New York Times, noting that "the gentle ribbing was perhaps a price the White House was willing to pay for the opportunity to reach Mr. Stewart’s valuable audience." As far as Stewart is concerned, the president's "presence was enough to quiet grumbles from some on the left that an election-eve snark-fest [Saturday's Rally to Restore Sanity] made light of the real dangers of Republican control," write Ben Smith and Byron Tau on Politico. "Stewart played a comic, not a courtier, to Obama on his set, but he also let the president appear to be in on the joke." To watch the interview, click here.