WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton bailed on a “Saturday Night Live” guest appearance, angering the show’s executive producer with her “sense of entitlement” and prompting him to book her rival for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama.
Clinton “wanted to do the first show of the [2007-08] season,” Lorne Michaels, executive producer of “SNL,” says in a newly updated book about the show, “Live from New York.”
“Obama was heating up, but they [Clinton’s campaign] called first, so I said OK. You have to play by those rules,” he was quoted as saying. “And then, the week of, they bailed. I went, ‘Really? You called us, and we gave it to you.’ ”
So Michaels turned to Obama to fill the slot.
“We put Obama on the date when Hillary was supposed to be on. The sense of entitlement which was following her everywhere at that point peaked for me at the bailing,” Michaels said, according to excepts published by The Hollywood Reporter.
The book, by James Andrew Miller and Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, also reveals that Obama nixed a sketch about racial profiling on airplanes. The bit featured an airline-safety video with a message targeted to Arabs: “During the flight, please do not blow up the airplane.”