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The Daily Mo

illustration by Tim Bower

Mo Rocca puts us in mind of champagne and tasteful nudity—he’s welcome just about everywhere. Along with Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell, Rocca got his start on The Daily Show. Since leaving Jon Stewart’s “news” team in 2003, he has embraced the itinerant course, bringing his deadpan satire to audiences on television, radio, and the Internet. He is a regular on CBS Sunday Morning, NPR’s Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me!, and the Huffington Post. In 2004 he had a hit book with All the Presidents’ Pets: The Story of One Reporter Who Refused to Roll Over. As he told 02138, you can see him just about anywhere you look.

Thanks very much for talking to me; is now a good time?
Yes; I just paused Jaws, which I’m watching again.

Why are you watching Jaws?
It’s for research, actually. I’m going swimming with sharks next week, on an expedition for the Tonight Show. I’ve already gone treasure hunting in Key West and for that I had to learn how to scuba dive. But swimming with sharks is actually fairly easy. I’m not going to be far under the water—and I’m in a cage, which is useful.

That sounds key.
It is if you’re dealing with great whites, who are meat eaters. But I’m going to bring a beautiful veggie platter with me, and hope that I’m dealing with a vegetarian, or vegan, shark.

Do you have an actual job title?
I’ve called myself a media gadfly, although I don’t know what that means. I’ve called myself a television personality. I think the best description of what I do is “cable television auditor.” Occasionally I’ll slum it in network. But I mainly check up on various cable stations.

And you’ve appeared on just about all of them, too.
I have. I’ve even been on Telemundo, in a telenovela (soap opera) called Amor Descarado. I was “turista numero dos,” which translates as “tourist number two,” but there was a lot more to it than that. I wore a great shirt. I still haven’t come down from my Latin fever.

Now how did you become a media auditor?
Harvard taught me well—how to sound like I know what I’m talking about even when I don’t. I can’t remember, but I think that was one of the Core requirements. I think that’s why I’m able to go shark hunting, be on telenovelas, comment on Supreme Court appointments, and judge cooking on the Food Network.

What’s the best part of your omnivorous job?
Getting paid to learn about new things quickly, usually courtesy of Wikipedia, and to be able to see the world. So it was either television personality or flight attendant.

Have you looked at your own entry on Wikipedia?
Of course I have.

Did you edit it at all?
No. Well, there was one error. I’m a panelist on Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me! on NPR, and the Wikipedians thought there was a show called Rewind. I don’t know anything about that. But I would compromise my allure and mystique if people knew that I’d lobbied Wikipedia.

Or that you’re a Wikipedian at all.
If Wikipedia were a religion, I would gladly join a coven. I knew that I should have majored in folklore and mythology.

Speaking of which, what were your thoughts on the end of Larry Summers’s presidency?
Well, Summers had said a lot worse in the past. Didn’t he once argue that America should dump its toxic waste in Nicaragua? It wasn’t worse than that: It wasn’t like he was suggesting that we should dump a cappella singers in Nicaragua. I’ll say this: When I was at Harvard it was the height of the PC thought police, where it seemed like meaningful debate was outlawed. That was a time when, somehow, in some weird perversion of academic culture, it became okay to say, “Your point of view is so extreme, I’m not even going to have a discussion with you.” We would have treasured the debate that ensued from Summers’s comments.

Who was president when you were at Harvard?
Derek Bok. I always thought it was kind of a bummer that he was our commencement speaker; he had to be, because he was leaving. And okay, he looked like John Forsythe, but, since the ’80s had just ended, I would have preferred John Forsythe. How cool would that have been? He would have had to do it as Blake Carrington, not as Charlie or the character from The Trouble with Harry. And he would have urged everyone to go into big oil. Which is still a pretty good idea.

If you could pick the next president of Harvard, whom would you pick?
I am a huge fan of Loretta Lynn, and I think she would be an amazing president of Harvard. I mean, this is a woman who had, I think, six children by the time she was 14, living in a shack dug out of the side of a mountain. And her husband came home one day, threw a guitar on her lap—she had babies just hanging from her—and within a week she was plucking out the hits and became a superstar. That’s really inspiring.

I doubt the faculty would mess with her.
The faculty wouldn’t mess with Loretta Lynn at all. She’s a straight talker. And she’d have a really great hook. If she talked about women in science, she would do it with a really great musical hook. Even if she agreed that women may not have the same natural aptitude for science, she would have made sure to stress that any real woman could kick her man’s ass. That would have mitigated it.

This sounds like a good proposal.
I definitely don’t want any of the so-called “new country” superstars to be president because their lyrics are so dippy. I wouldn’t want Kenny Chesney to be president; right now what Harvard needs is stability, and Kenny Chesney, in light of his brief marriage to Renée Zellweger, would not provide it.

Two of the more famous Harvard grads that are in the media, Al Franken and Bill O’Reilly, have a very famous enmity. Do you have a public archnemesis?
I have always had a problem with Yakov Smirnoff. I think he’s sort of a fair-weather friend to liberty. People forget that when Chernenko and Andropov were brutal overlords of the Soviet empire, we heard not a peep from Yakov Smirnoff.

You famously dubbed the 2004 Democratic convention “Obamarama.” What will the 2008 convention be, in one word?
The GOP side will be McCainamania. They should get the maniac song from Flashdance. [sings] “We’re McCainiacs, Cainiacs on the floor.” I’m trying to think who could do that Jennifer Beals thing with the bucket of water over her. Liddy Dole?

Who would you like to see run in 2008?
It would be tremendous if Hillary Clinton ran. It would be a huge political and cultural moment if a woman ran for president. It’s kind of sad: If you waste as much time as I do watching cable news, you’re aware that commentators—naturally men—are already fetishizing a Hillary-Condi race. No matter where you stand politically, you would think that when speculating on something like that, that it would be pretty amazing, there’d be a woman president. But instead it seems like it’s more about titillation. What do they think is going to happen at the first debate: They’re going to throw down a wrestling mat?

Well, Dick Morris has a kind of prurient mind.
Dick Morris is obsessed. I mean, I’m not suggesting that Dick Morris would pay a couple of hookers to dress up as Condi and Hillary for him. I’m not suggesting that at all.

Do you think Al Gore could make a comeback?
Al Gore has to keep his eye on the thermometer. The hotter it gets, the more relevant he is. His poll numbers are in Fahrenheit. If I were Al Gore I would buy space heaters, go to all the public spaces in America’s swing states, plug them in, and get them as hot as possible.