Desperate times require desperate candidates. How do you gauge national desperation? Stephen Colbert is polling in double digits.
For you cable-free readers, comedian Colbert's "The Colbert Report" stars the real Colbert as the character Colbert in a deadpan send-up of the bumptious, righter-than-thou malarkey merchants of cable TV news.
Colbert (the character) announced he'd run for president in his home-state primary in South Carolina. A national poll by Rasmussen Reports and Fox News, the cable channel populated by the bully boys Colbert parodies, put him at 12% against Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. More than a million Facebook members have signed on for Colbert.
The real candidates, some of whom poll below Colbert, are trying to go along with the joke without becoming the butt of it. Is this guy funny or frightening?
Film and fiction love putting unlikely characters into the Oval Office. Over the years, we've seen black men as president (James Earl Jones and Chris Rock), women (Geena Davis and Polly Bergen), a genial look-alike (Kevin Kline) and a late-night political comedian (Robin Williams). They all test democracy in our imaginations by placing unexpected figures in the job and checking to see whether the republic's elastic can keep its snap, and by inference, whether we can eventually accept actual different types in the White House: a woman, a black man, a Mormon, a man married three times (the last two are not the same candidate).
Send-up candidacies like Colbert's have their own long history. In 1879, in the New York Evening Post, Mark Twain nominated himself with a sardonic confessional: "I have pretty much made up my mind to run for president. What the country wants is a candidate who cannot be injured by investigation of his past history. ... If you know the worst about a candidate, to begin with, every attempt to spring things on him will be checkmated." Twain punctured plutocrats too well to have made any headway in the smoke-filled rooms of the Gilded Age. But he undoubtedly has more things named after him -- including an asteroid -- than the man who did become president, James Garfield.
Most dark-comic candidacies emerge in grim times: Pat Paulsen in 1968, Will Rogers in 1932.
