Jon Stewart Ices Jim Cramer With Earnest Anger, Not Bombast

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

If you haven't seen it, the Jon Stewart-Jim Cramer interview from Thursday night was actually worth the hype. You know there's something going on when the people weighing positively for Stewart afterward range from TPM and James Fallows, who compares Stewart to both Edward R. Murrow and David Frost (so who plays whom in "Stewart/Cramer"?) and even the non-political gang over at ProFootballTalk.com ("Speaking in a voice that at times was passionate and faintly cracking with emotion as he grilled Cramer, Stewart made the typically bombastic financial guru come off as a wiseguy trying to reason with the hitman who had been sent to whack him.")

Stewart is skilled at his chuck-and-duck shtick (being serious but then hiding behind being a comedian), but he's also flatly a skilled interviewer (and I'm not just saying that). Perhaps because he is able to hide behind the clown face, Stewart is able to, as Fallows points out, do the Frost thing and brutal questions but manage it without Matthews-esque bombast. (In fairness to Chris Matthews, his face-off against Ari Fleischer the other day was pretty riveting too.)

Anyway, after the jump you can find the first part of Stewart/Cramer as well as links to parts two and three.

Part 2.

Part 3.

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