If someone would have asked you who you thought would be a good person to appear on a national news program to discuss politics, we’re guessing that UB.com’s Tiffany Michelle would have been way down your list. Sure enough, however, Michelle was Neil Cavuto’s guest Tuesday on his Fox Business Network show, “Cavuto,” comparing President Barack Obama‘s persistence with his health care plan to a poker player playing bad cards.
In the five-minute conversation, titled “Obama Making a Bad Bet?” on the Fox Business website, there was no debate on whether the proposed health care reform plan was good; it was simply assumed it was bad and that the majority of Americans are against it. Cavuto’s interview consisted of repeatedly asking Michelle to compare the President’s health care efforts to playing poor hands. For her part, Michelle came off fairly well, indulging Cavuto by using poker metaphor after poker metaphor to describe Obama’s health care reform strategy.
Some tidbits:
Neil Cavuto: Taking a look at what the President’s doing… a good gambler, I understand, or someone who bets a lot, understands, or thinks, that he or she has a good hand. Am I right?
Tiffany Michelle: Yeah, generally you have a good hand, or you know if you have a bad hand, how to maneuver with that hand and take advantage of your opponent’s weaknesses.
Cavuto: Now, the President, fairly or not Tiffany, is viewed to have a bad hand right now because prior cards he’s dealt have turned out to be, you know, threes and fours. They haven’t really worked out. Yet he continues playing the same hand. What is the strategy behind that?
Michelle: [Preceding portion of answer snipped] What often happens for some players is you continue to push the issues, you continue to play the bad hands, you continue to get in sticky situations, and what really needs to happen is you need to step away from the table, you need to clear your head.
Tiffany Michelle laid it on thick, inserting poker comparisons at every turn. Some of her best lines included:
“Here we are, let’s say we’re deep in the World Series, we’re coming close to the bubble, you can taste that final table and the money and it’s not looking like it’s going to happen.”
“Not only did Barack Obama in his first year in office decide to tackle one of the toughest issues in U.S. politics… it would be like me approaching Phil Hellmuth on my first day of my poker game and saying, ‘Hey, Phil Hellmuth, you have 11 bracelets. I want to challenge you heads-up.'”
“Talk about Scott Brown, that was a really bad beat for Barack Obama and the Democrats, who really thought they had a good chip lead there. You know, they thought they had a lock on this tournament.”
Members of the poker community universally panned the interview. The reactions, however, were split between those who detested the fact that Michelle was chosen as the poker representative and those who simply thought that the interview itself was horrible.
He added, “I thought it was evenly presented, the gambling expert knew as much about gambling as the politics expert new abt politics,” as well as, “I think it was more shady that TM passed herself off as a gambling expert with a clue abt politics to promote herself.”
“Hollywood” Dave Stann, one of Tiffany Michelle’s fellow UB.com pros, was more disgusted with Fox Business, Cavuto, and the interview itself, Tweeting, “WTF FoxNews? Generic gambling terms dissing Obama, then using pro gamblers as pawns 2 back it up? I dodged their invite 2day, thank fuck!”
Summing it up for someone who asked what the interview was all about, Stann tweeted, “fucking Fox presenting right-wing editorial talking points as ‘news’ then interviewing pros as ‘evidence’ of Obama ineptitude.”
Some of the more entertaining comments on the interview came from the Two Plus Two forums. Forum poster “TheTruthSpeaks” wrote, “While I was watching it I kept waiting to wake up as this certainly must be a dream or something. I mean surely I didn’t really just see Tiffany Michelle on a news channel talking about politics while using horrible poker analogies to do it. This has got to be the first sign of the Apocalypse.”
“Randomness28” may have had two of the best quotes on how ridiculous the interview concept was, first saying, “Funny that the Q is ‘How is Obama playing his hand?’ …. so they decide to bring in a poker player for analysis. Someone should tell the staff of Cavuto’s that ‘playing his hand’ is just a figure of speech. Next on Cavuto: ‘Are Republicans a move ahead of Democrats in setting up for 2012? We bring in chess GM to discuss this.'”
He later added, “Equivalent of this would be for Fox to pose the Q: How is the Obama administration going to kick off its second term in office? And to bring in a third string kicker of a Junior College to answer the Q.”
Judge the Tiffany Michelle Fox Business interview for yourself.
Tiffany Michelle got her start in the poker world in 2006, when she served as an on-air host for the World Series of Poker (WSOP) coverage on Sirius Satellite Radio. In 2007, she appeared on-camera, hosting various segments and conducting interviews for PokerNews.com. Michelle officially turned heads the following year when she was the last woman remaining in the WSOP Main Event, eventually bowing out in 17th place and earning $334,534. She was exposed to a nationwide audience in 2009 when she and fellow poker pro, Maria Ho, competed on the hit CBS show, “The Amazing Race.”