In two years as the host of his mock news commentary program on Comedy Central, comedian Stephen Colbert has made a habit of rallying his audience of 1.5 million viewers to collective action on his behalf. In August 2006, when the Hungarian government opened an online poll to allow individuals to vote on names for a new bridge, Colbert directed viewers of “The Colbert Report” to the poll’s Web site and asked them to stuff the ballot box. Within a day, “Stephen Colbert Bridge” was the leading vote getter. Hungary voided the results when the number of votes on Colbert’s behalf — 17 million — far exceeded the country’s population. And just a month earlier, Colbert declared by fiat that the population of African elephants had tripled in the previous six months, and at his behest, scores of viewers flooded Wikipedia with edits to the “elephant” entry to reflect the new “fact.”
It should therefore come as no surprise that Colbert now is asking his audience to help him out in the ultimate act of self-promotion: running for president. On the Oct. 16 edition of “The Colbert Report,” he announced that he will seek the presidential nomination in both the Democratic and Republican primaries in his home state of South Carolina.
In playing a pseudo-populist, fact-averse cable news pundit in the mold of Bill O’Reilly, Colbert has managed to capture the zeitgeist of our political culture better than anyone else. In 2006, Merriam-Webster named “truthiness” — a word coined by Colbert during his show’s premiere to denote gut feelings contradicted by objective fact — the “Word of the Year.” And two days before last year’s midterm elections, New York Times columnist Frank Rich pronounced, “(T)he defining moment of the 2006 campaign may well have been back in April, when Colbert appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.” Colbert’s performance, which skewered our “truthy” president and the credulous Washington press corps, fell flat among the audience of Beltway journalists but was a huge hit when the video of it circulated on the Internet.
Now, in his latest stunt, Colbert has pulled off a savvy bit of satirical jiu-jitsu: The mass media have reacted to Colbert’s announcement like catnip, and in covering it, they have done nearly all the work in parodying their coverage of conventional presidential campaigns.
Colbert has been making the rounds on numerous talk shows, including last Sunday’s appearance on “Meet the Press,” that venerable talk show whose interviews are normally conducted with administration officials, high-profile legislators and serious presidential candidates.
No doubt most hosts are simply humoring Colbert and his presidential ambitions. He is, after all, promoting his new book, “I Am America (And So Can You!),” and a glut of television interviews is par for the course for high-profile authors of new releases.
However, much of the speculation about Colbert’s nascent campaign has been fairly straight-faced and un-ironic. Josh Green of The Atlantic reckons Colbert has the best shot of winning a delegate in the Republican primary, and he should focus his efforts on wooing voters in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District: “Besides being most likely to respond to the ‘native son’ gambit, the heavily conservative district’s voters tend to be upscale economic conservatives rather than social conservatives.” On Oct. 18, The New York Times ran a dry article about all of the Democratic and Republican Party rules Colbert would have to comply with to get his name on either party’s primary ballot.
And finally, the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies (a company whose name reduces to a rather unfortunate acronym) conducted a national poll showing Colbert with 2.3 percent support in the Democratic primary and less than 1 percent in the Republican primary.
What Colbert has achieved is something approaching a satirical nirvana — a state where the barriers between parody and reality dissolve, and the two meld together. During the Bush administration, especially after so many of the president’s speeches about success in Iraq, it has become somewhat of a cliche to note that satire and real life are sometimes nearly indistinguishable. But usually that union arises through the darkly comic process of our political discourse moving toward farce. With Colbert, the movement is in the other direction.
To be sure, Colbert’s mock candidacy isn’t without precedent. Comedian Pat Paulsen campaigned in nearly every presidential election from 1968 to 1996, placing a distant second behind incumbent Bill Clinton in the 1996 New Hampshire Democratic primary.
While Colbert’s campaign isn’t exactly pioneering, the Comedy Central pundit has so aptly injected himself into the political process that it’s hard not to wonder if the run for the White House will mark the apex of his relevance. If the absurdity and unreality of our political culture that has characterized the Bush era comes to an end soon — and I hope it does — then Colbert’s moment will pass.
For now, though, it’s probably best to jump on the Colbert ’08 bandwagon, enjoying Colbert’s antics and seeing what happens if he wins a delegate or two in South Carolina.
—Michael Maio is a senior in the College of Arts and Science.
