The Washington Post gushed all over ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel on the morning before he hosts the Oscars, but reporter Geoff Edgers didn’t focus on the Oscars. It began by honoring his teary sermon about Health Care For All. The headline was "Late show of emotion: Jimmy Kimmel might be America’s conscience but he’ll still do anything for a laugh."
Edgers was anything but edgy, touting how Kimmel built an audience after early skepticism and had now, apparently, spread his wings into something beautiful on behalf of Obamacare:
“You can’t not remember that night,” says Ellen DeGeneres, a longtime friend. “The fact that you’re seeing a really strong, smart funny man cry is beautiful. He’s not trying to be tough. He’s not trying to pretend. He’s not trying to act like a talk-show host. And it wasn’t salacious. It wasn’t to get ratings. It was just raw, and you don’t see that on television that much.” [Italics theirs.]
In the good, old days — say, before Nov. 8, 2016 — Kimmel didn’t have the slightest interest in lobbying for health-care legislation. He had studied late-night TV since he was a kid. Political advocacy seemed like a bad play.
“You never knew what Dave was [Letterman???], you never knew what Jay Leno was, you never knew what Johnny Carson was,” he said in his office on a recent afternoon. “I didn’t want my jokes to be tainted. I wanted my jokes to be taken as jokes.”
He was more than careful. Kimmel masked his political giving by donating everything he and McNearney gave under her name. In the past two years, that ranged from $100 to $2,700 donations to candidates across the country as well as former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s gun-control campaign.
“He was very pointedly not political,” says comedian Sarah Silverman, a longtime friend whom he dated for years. “He didn’t want to lose audience. I remember he forwarded me something to host for Katie Couric for gun control because he didn’t want to get political, and I was like, gun control?”...
After his passionate monologue about Billy, he gave up trying to pretend. He even sent $2,700 to Doug Jones, the Democrat who was running against Republican Roy Moore in Alabama — under his own name.
Several preposterous publicity utterances follow, like this unintentionally hilarious executive-suite baloney from ABC entertainment boss Channing Dungey. “Even when he’s poking fun at something,” she says, “he’s doing it in a way that feels playful and not mean-spirited.”
Then there's this typically lame protest:
His only real frustration is when he gets attacked for being part of the “Hollywood elite.”
“That’s not how I think of myself, certainly, and I don’t come from a show business family,” Kimmel says. “I just wound up getting into local radio and just stumbled into this.
Earth to Kimmel: When you have been a late-night TV host on a major broadcast network for 15 years, you are by definition a "Hollywood elite." When you double down on that by being a leftist talking-point machine, you double-earn the title. Accept it with your millions.
