Stephen Colbert in the Oval Office?

America: Stephen Colbert is running for president.

That’s right — the man whose idea of political correctness means having “official” black and Asian friends has jumped on the 2008 campaign wagon in a bid for the White House. This late-night jester has gone from making jokes about democracy to making a joke of democracy. Well, not quite. For now he’s only running in South Carolina, his home state, as a favorite son candidate. From there he’ll survey his prospective expansion into the other states.

But here’s the burning question: is Stephen Colbert running for president, or is Stephen Colbert’s character running for president? For the uninitiated, Colbert on television is not Colbert in real life, unlike Jon Stewart, Dave Letterman, and pretty much every other late-night pundit. Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report is the result of a spin-off of The Daily Show featuring the self-centered, extremely conservative correspondent Colbert played on Stewart’s program. Though The Colbert Report is a toddler next to The Daily Show, which has enjoyed more than a decade on the air, its widespread success has earned it a pedestal tall enough to put the sister shows at eye level. In fact, I don’t think Colbert could have pulled this off without maintaining his Dailly Show character, who is essentially Jon Stewart’s foil. Stewart is a Jewish liberal; Colbert is an ultraconservative Christian. Back to back, the two make for some very entertaining television.

So to answer the question of whether Colbert himself or his eneagled television counterpart is running for president, let’s take a look at some things he’s said this past week. In choosing a running mate, he’s considered Republican candidate Mike Huckabee, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and even himself, saying “Colbert-Colbert — that’s a strong ticket.” The comedic notion that he plans to run on both the Democratic and Republican platforms, allowing his voters to determine his political stance for him, seems apt for Television Colbert. “I’d let the people decide what party I belong in,” he said. “I don’t dictate the people’s actions.”¹ Yet his character is a democrat-bashing conservative whose views don’t align with this bipartisan endeavor. Perhaps it is best to ignore the blurred line between fiction and reality, as even Colbert can’t make the distinction:

“My character’s history may not always be perfectly consistent… there’s my bio and there’s my character’s bio, and then there’s my character’s history, which is slightly different than my character’s bio.”

I can’t help but notice the parallelism between Colbert’s announcement and the 2006 film Man of the Year. Tom Dobbs, played by Robin Williams, is a late-night pundit. (Can you see the connection?) After one of Dobbs’ political rants, an audience member suggests he run for president, to which he capriciously concedes. Due to a glitch in the new digital voting machines related to the candidates’ last names, Dobbs nabs the White House.

But does Colbert really need luck to gain votes, or is he extrapolating that his godlike control over his viewers will extend to the American people? In his guest rant in Maureen Dowd’s New York Times op-ed column last Sunday, he claimed that old people “look like lizards” and that he’s not sure which candidates he should be sacred of. Despite the humor, there are still countless Colbert Nation fanatics who are probably taking his every word for its literal meaning. These people will go to their graves supporting Colbert’s character, who is clearly the one waving the American flag here.

From a serious standpoint, there is no way, apart from an extremely implausible computer glitch, that Colbert will ever be President. After all, we’re talking about the man who roasted Bush from ten feet away at the 2006 White House Correspondent’s Dinner — the man whose invitation the White House must invariably regret. I must admit, however, that this was quite an ingenious move on Colbert’s part: he used his character’s unwavering Bush fanaticism to win his real personality twenty minutes of point-blank satire.

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But the majority of Americans, to Colbert’s chagrin, are going to show their serious attitudes towards the Presidency by voting for someone they see fit to run the most powerful country in the world. In the off chance that Colbert does elicit a nomination from either party, though, I don’t see him as having a real shot in the election. But even if he is running as a joke — even if this is only a publicity stunt to boost his enormously popular show’s already massive viewership — I’d vote for him. After all, I have been “desperate for a white, male, middle-aged, Jesus-trumpeting alternative.”²

¹ Source: CNN
² From Dowd’s Sunday column