As anyone who has ever watched Jimmy Fallon knows, the job of a late-night talk-show host features a great deal of enthusiastic shilling for people, places, and things. Hosting is the ability to align one’s charm—or, in Colbert’s case, his decency and intelligence—with brands. Letterman was famously terrible at this part of the job. I’ll miss that level of incompetence.
.. Colbert did one gentle ambush, which involved a staged interaction with his own brother, designed to elicit a genuine answer from Jeb: Could he name a policy difference between himself and his brother George? In response, Jeb simply emphasized, once again, that, unlike George, he was a small-government conservative who favored “fiscal restraint.” No one brought up the war. Colbert is smart. But the toothlessness was unnerving.