Except for Pat Paulsen, no other fringe candidate, clown or Quixote, ever received as much attention as Stephen Colbert, host of the satiric television show The Colbert Report (“frenchenciously” pronounced, should anyone from Mars or the thirtieth century be reading this, colbère repore). Colbert competed in the 2008 presidential primary in his home state of South Carolina. In the 2012 election he made overtures about running again, financially endorsed this time by a satiric, but nonetheless actual, political action committee (PAC) he created known as Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow.
On the surface Colbert’s 2008 candidacy appeared to be that of yet another comedian using a presidential election as a stage for his act. “In the great American tradition of the late Pat Paulsen,” one South Carolina newspaper commented, “Colbert’s entry into the race in this state . . . was highlighted by this pledge to the voters. ‘I defy any other candidate to pander more to the people of South Carolina.’” Similar to previous presidential bids by comedians, Colbert joked that by running in his home state he would have a “favorite son” advantage—“though not my mother’s favorite son; she’s too fair-minded to ever show a preference.” Foremost on his platform was his vow to “crush” the state of Georgia, taking offense at its nickname, the Peach State. “Our peaches are more numerous than Georgia’s,” he declared, stirring up parodied passions by adding that South Carolina’s peaches are “more juiciful.”1
Right from the start, however, Colbert’s campaign for the presidency showed signs of going one step beyond those of prior bids by comedians. Where Pat Paulsen and Gracie Allen (and their writers) churned out campaign-related books during their candidacies, Colbert and his writers more accurately satirized traditional politicians by publishing a book shortly before the onset of his campaign. In South Carolina’s primary that year’s leading contenders in the Democratic Party were New York senator and former first lady Hillary Clinton, Illinois senator Barack Obama, and former North Carolina senator John Edwards; the leading Republican Party contenders were Arizona senator John McCain, Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Texas congressman Ron Paul, and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—all of whom published books during this period of time.2
Likewise Colbert. His book I Am America (And So Can You!) appeared in bookstores in early October 2007, two weeks before he declared himself to be a candidate for president. The satiric irony in the book’s content and publication date did not go unnoticed by the media’s White House watchers—abetted by Colbert and his publicists. On ABC’s Good Morning America, he commented in an interview with Diane Sawyer, “A lot of people see this book as me testing the waters for a presidential run.” Sawyer (best known as a network news anchor) played along and pressed him on that point, enabling Colbert to get laughs by summoning the false modesty of traditional politicians setting the stage to announce their candidacy by “sincerely” replying, “It’s just not a question I’m ready to answer right now.”3
On the heels of that appearance, Colbert ramped up this parody when he appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live. “A lot of people see this book,” Colbert said, “and I know you’re about to ask this—a lot of people see this book as testing the waters for a run for political office.” King too joined in the charade by directly asking if he was going to run for president, to which Colbert’s pseudo-sincere reply this go-round was, “Well Larry, I’ve got to—this question comes as a complete surprise.”4
Colbert then amped the parody even higher. It was publicized that he would have a major announcement on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Comedy Central’s widely watched parody of a news broadcast. Much as traditional presidential contenders often announce their candidacy from their home state or other significant place from their past, Colbert was returning to the show that begat his faux journalist persona in 1997 and eight years later begat The Colbert Report, which aired in the next time slot—often with Stewart and Colbert doing a comic handover. All of these elements set the stage for Colbert’s returning to The Daily Show for his major announcement. He entered in a red, white, and blue bicycle cart pedaled by Uncle Sam, springing from it to work the cheering audience much as traditional candidates work crowds with a multitude of quick not-quite-handshakes, after which he used a hand sanitizer, then pulled out a bale of hay and sat on it with a bottle of beer, declaring, “It’s great to be back with the people,” referring to himself as “an Average Joe.” Clearly the moment had arrived for his much anticipated announcement. Stewart set it up, and Colbert pumped up the parody yet again by declaring, in verbiage reminiscent of John Donkey, “Tonight, I, Stephen Colbert, am officially announcing that I have decided to officially consider whether or not I will announce that I am running for President of the United States. And I will be making an announcement of that decision very soon—preferably on a more prestigious show.”5
That show turned out to be his own, in the broadcast that followed. “After nearly fifteen minutes of soul-searching,” he told his audience, “I have heard the call!” Music played, a torrent of red, white, and blue balloons fell from above, and his audience duly went wild.
While Colbert had stated that he planned to enter only the South Carolina primary, some wondered if his bid would be so limited. “Exactly how far the mock conservative pundit planned to stretch his impression of a presidential candidate wasn’t clear,” the Associated Press noted in its report of Colbert’s announcement.6 Indeed unlike the comic candidacies of celebrities Will Rogers, Gracie Allen, and Pat Paulsen, the candidacy of Stephen Colbert caused concern among some in the news media. One day after Colbert’s announcement, the Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz sounded an alarm that highlighted a key difference in the political landscape of the 2008 election from that of prior eras. “Colbert’s chances may be slim,” he wrote, “but in today’s infotainment culture, he could draw precious media attention from the second-tier contenders. And he has a nightly platform to milk the spectacle for jokes, if not votes . . . [by] saying what matters is not some boring adherence to the facts but a matter’s essential ‘truthiness.’”7
Bear in mind, Kurtz was a fan of The Colbert Report. He’d begun this particular column by writing, “It has become something of a television cliché: politicians launching their electoral campaigns on late-night talk shows, in a calculated attempt at hipness. But a late-night comic announcing his presidential candidacy on a late-night talk show—now that is a hall of mirrors maneuver worthy of Stephen Colbert.” Nevertheless there was indeed a basis for Kurtz’s concern. Infotainment referred to news programs in which the degree of entertainment value had come to impact so much on news value as to blur the distinction. Kurtz’s Washington Post colleague Michael Cavna spoke in more detail and more broadly about this change in the political landscape when he wrote not only of such news programs but also of Colbert’s and Stewart’s satiric news shows. “The blurring of news and entertainment, comedy, and punditry . . . contributes to the shift,” he observed.8 So much had infotainment become a part of the nation’s political landscape that Kurtz used what was then a recently coined word, truthiness. Today the Oxford English Dictionary defines truthiness as “the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.” And attributes its first use to Stephen Colbert.
Colbert introduced the term on the first broadcast of The Colbert Report. When it premiered on October 17, 2005, the program included a segment that would recur, “The Wørd.” In this first installment Colbert’s parody of popular right-wing commentators such as Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh conveyed even more profoundly than all the journalists cited above what the nation’s political landscape had become—doing so via this faux pledge to his viewers:
You’re looking at a straight shooter, America. . . . I will speak to you in plain, simple English. And that brings us to tonight’s word. Truthiness. Now I’m sure that some of the word police . . . are gonna say, “Hey, that’s not a word.” Well, anyone who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true, or what did or didn’t happen. . . . I don’t trust books. They’re all facts; no heart. And that’s exactly what’s pulling our country apart today. . . . We are divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart. . . . The truthiness is anyone can read the news to you; I promise to feel the news at you.
Others amplified the concern over Colbert’s campaign (which ironically was designed, through the use of irony, to convey the same concern). One columnist noted that Colbert’s “‘truthiness’ is so infectious, for the first time, a television character stands to make a political dent.” Another columnist furthered that concern when she warned, “Even if the campaign turns out to be a farce . . . we live in a nation where celebrity influence alone can translate effectively into political support and power, or people distrust political figures to the point they will support a fictional celebrity pundit over credible candidates.”9
Not, however, in 2008. Colbert’s run never got out of the gate. Following his announcement, the hawk-eyed Federal Communications Commission began circling his television show, preparing to swoop down with its Equal Time provisions should he be deemed a viable candidate. Likewise the Federal Election Commission questioned whether or not the show’s new segment—“Stephen Colbert, Hail to the Cheese, Nacho Cheese Doritos® 2008 Presidential Campaign”—constituted a corporation illegally advocating directly for a political candidate, as opposed to legally sponsoring a satire.10 With this aspect of Colbert’s clown candidacy, particularly in comparison to those of prior comics, we can see how much more than ever before in the nation’s history the line between the political and the ridiculous was genuinely blurring.
Colbert managed to dodge the second of these issues by renaming the segment “Stephen Colbert, Hail to the Cheese, Nacho Cheese Doritos® 2008 Presidential Campaign COVERAGE,” with the capitalization part of the gag in making it satiric news rather than satiric campaigning—and illustrating again how blurred that distinction had become. But the next snag he encountered was not so easily eluded. Initially he had said he would run in both the Republican and Democratic primaries. There are no primaries for independents, nor did either party in South Carolina enable write-in votes on their primary ballots. The Republican Party’s filing fee to get on the South Carolina primary ballot was $35,000, compared to $2,500 for the Democratic Party. While Colbert’s TV persona was that of an arch-conservative Republican, the actual Colbert was not. And despite his wealth as a television star, he could not bring himself to fork over $35,000 to the Republican Party. While he was happy to pay the Democratic Party fee, they allowed only viable presidential candidates on the ballot, which its officials ruled Colbert was not since he was running in only one primary.11
Although Colbert’s campaign was over, the concern it aroused was not. “The mainstream Beltway press could barely contain its glee as it cheered on the stunt, lavishing all sorts of media attention on Colbert and basking in the entertainment glow that his act brought to the White House campaign trail,” Eric Boehlert wrote in a syndicated opinion piece. Boehlert, a one-time contributing editor to Rolling Stone, was no knee-jerk conservative. Still, he wrote, “I’m almost relieved that Democratic officials in South Carolina squashed the Colbert stunt by denying his attempt to get on the ballot. That’s the only way the press was going to drop the story.” Presciently he went on to warn, “The press has decided to cover presidential candidates as celebrities . . . [not as] how candidates might function as presidents . . . [but based on] which candidate was fun to be around.”12
On the more highbrow side, a considerable number of academics were also looking into what Colbert’s campaign revealed about America. An entire volume in the series Popular Culture and Philosophy was devoted to scholarly essays regarding that volume’s title, Stephen Colbert and Philosophy. In the behavioral sciences some researchers designed studies to measure Colbert’s impact on political views. One such study found that, counter to what might be expected, “when young adults are exposed to The Colbert Report’s humor, they are not led to be more critical of the far right, instead, the opposite happens.”13 Another study very differently concluded, “Conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.”14 Yet another professor, Joseph Faina at the University of Texas–Austin, concluded, “These studies are not inaccurate but I do contend they are incomplete.” In an article titled “Public Journalism Is a Joke,” Faina delved into the full spectrum along which news and entertainment were blurring, citing a key technological development as the cause. “Cable news ‘debate’ shows are the primary culprit,” he wrote. “These shows could provide some opportunity for deliberation but dissolve into argumentation, the objective of which is to prevail rather than resolve . . . to parse up the social and political world into ‘winners’ and ‘losers.’”15
In order to compete with so much more news programming now available via cable television and the many viewers flocking to the entertainment of no-holds-barred political shows, traditional network news producers increased their reliance on entertainment values, as evidenced by traditional journalists and news anchors such as Diane Sawyer being assigned to shows such as Good Morning America and by the attention the entire news media devoted to Colbert’s campaign.
No one was more concerned about this trend than Colbert and his faux news mentor, Stewart. While Colbert sought to combat it in 2008 with his satiric campaign, Stewart took an opportunity to combat it directly in an appearance on one of cable television’s premiere no-holds-barred debate shows, CNN’s Crossfire. Cohosted by the conservative Tucker Carlson and the liberal Paul Begala, the October 15, 2004, broadcast opened with an announcement that the two were going to take a break from campaign politics, anticipating a fun-filled interview with the comedian Stewart. But Stewart pulled the rug out from under them moments after being introduced when he asked, “Can I say something very quickly? Why do we have to fight?” Begala and Carlson did their professional best to get back on track, but Stewart wouldn’t play along. “I made a special effort to come on the show today,” he said, “because . . . this show is bad. . . . It’s hurting America.”
Carlson inadvertently demonstrated just how much the line between news and entertainment had blurred when he argued that Stewart was equally guilty by failing to ask hardball questions in his show’s interviews with political candidates. “Maybe this explains a lot,” Stewart snapped back, “that the news organizations look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity. . . . You’re on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.”
In the 2012 election Colbert set his satiric sights on a change in campaign financing that resulted from the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations, labor unions, and other organizations have the same free speech rights as people—though it upheld the prohibition of such organizations from directly contributing to or coordinating their speech with candidates for public office or political parties.16 The ruling opened the way for a flood of money to be used by PACs to finance political messages that, by law, had to disclose the name of the PAC—but not the names of its donors. President Obama declared that the ruling “reversed a century of law that, I believe, will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.” His opponent from the 2008 election, Senator John McCain, called the ruling “disgraceful, absolutely disgraceful.”17
Colbert agreed. Hence, in the 2012 election, he formed his own PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow. To oversee and explain the legality of Colbert’s clearly ridiculous but actual PAC, he brought onto those episodes of The Colbert Report his lawyer, Trevor Potter, who clearly knew the ins-and-outs, having been the chairman of the Federal Election Commission. Untold amounts of money (because the law didn’t require him to tell) were contributed to Colbert’s PAC by unknown (because the law didn’t require him to tell) donors. Suffice it to say the sums were sufficient for the PAC to run satiric ads targeted at particular candidates. One such sixty-second spot opened with an American flag waving behind a “Wall St.” sign, patriotic music, and a narration that began, “Corporations—America’s greatest institution. They built this country one job at a time.” It soon cuts to a clip of Mitt Romney saying, “Corporations are people, my friends.” The visuals suddenly become disturbing and distorted as the narrator ominously says, “But Mitt Romney has a secret. As the head of Bain Capital, he bought up companies, carved them up, and got rid of what he couldn’t use. If Mitt Romney really believes [repeat of Romney clip saying, “Corporations are people, my friends”] then Mitt Romney [slight pause] is a serial killer.” We then hear maniacal laughter behind an image of Romney smiling, followed by the narrator intoning, “He’s Mitt the Ripper!” After its closing visuals and sound effects, the ad ends with what was now the familiar verbal fine print of such commercials: “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow are responsible for the content of this advertisement.”18
In a final ridiculous but real twist demonstrating how the limitations on PACs were, in reality, ridiculous, Colbert announced that he was establishing an “exploratory committee” to decide whether or not to make a second run for president. In order to run, however, he would have to disconnect himself from his PAC since, under the Supreme Court’s rulings, PACs cannot coordinate with candidates. Thus on the January 12, 2012, episode of The Colbert Report, with attorney Potter present and providing the necessary paperwork, Colbert officially signed over his PAC to (who else?) Jon Stewart—with whom, allegedly, he would not coordinate his campaign. All of which was as legal as it was absurd.
Colbert knew as well as any comedian that jokes work only once—and no doubt knew that deadlines had passed for entering the primaries. What little effort he made this second time around ended when, because of the deadline, he was unable to enter the South Carolina primary.
Future elections would tell what impact, if any, Colbert’s satiric candidacies had in reducing the degree to which news and entertainment—and, by extension, the political and the ridiculous—had merged.
SPOILER ALERT: Two days after Colbert handed over control of his PAC to Stewart, the Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri commented, “I was as startled as anyone to hear CNN declare this week that the Republican race for president is a Deeply Serious Contest with no room for jokers. Has CNN been watching the race? Does it remember when it considered Donald Trump a serious candidate?”19