The ‘Wheel of Fortune’ host and Hillary-teasing tweeter talks about his political education and American exceptionalism.
Pat Sajak was tweeting Hillary Clinton jokes again. Days before I was scheduled to interview him after a taping of “Wheel of Fortune,” the show he has hosted for 34 years, Mr. Sajak pecked out a message: “Just received an email from the Clinton campaign. Must be important; it’s marked ‘Top Secret.’ ”
The previous week Mr. Sajak had sent this to his 80,000 Twitter followers: “Exciting breakthrough near: Climate scientists close to perfecting giant thermostat to regulate earth’s temperature!” Two days before that, he’d taken to the social-media website to say: “It’s not that the government does everything poorly; it’s just that when it does something poorly, it keeps doing it.”
Fans of “Wheel of Fortune” are familiar with Mr. Sajak’s wit—his repartee with contestants and banter with alphabetic wonderwoman Vanna White. But on Twitter the one-liners come spiked with something else: conservatism. “My overall philosophy about politics and show business,” Mr. Sajak tells me in his dressing room at Sony Pictures Studios, “is even a game-show host has as much right as anyone to babble about anything he wants to.”
In other words, Hillary Clinton jokes are fair game, so long as he makes them off the air. “My only objection is the bait and switch,” Mr. Sajak says. “It just kills me when someone’s on a talk show to promote a movie, and I’ve got to sit through saving the whales first. I like whales as much as the next guy—especially filleted. They’re really tasty.”
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