Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s The Definitely Not Coordinating With Steven Colbert Super Pac!
If you are reading this in the UK, the above sentence probably flew over your head higher than anything even Superman himself could manage. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault – unless you are one of the executives at digital channel FX who decided to drop The Colbert Report from its schedule.
So a quick recap: The Colbert Report (pronounced ‘Rap-por’) is the funniest satirical show on television anywhere in the world. (Caveat: probably the best – you can’t seriously expect us to have seen every satirical show on every channel in the world!). It is fronted by comedian Steven Colbert (pronounced: ‘Col-bear’) playing a character called Steven Colbert, an egotistical, right-wing, god-fearing zealot of the type usually found fronting a Fox News show.
Yet this is not just the kind of satire that wags its finger at the insanity of modern politics from a safe distance, has a chuckle and then goes home to count its money. No, this is satire that gets down and dirty (not literally) in the trenches of realpolitik. Afterall, Colbert is the man who eviscerated (not literally) George W. Bush at a Whitehouse Correspondent’s dinner in 2006.
Last June we reported on Colbert’s successful application to the US Federal Election Commission to set up his own Super PAC (political action committee) in order to the highlight the absurdity of the US Supreme Court’s ruling that corporate funding of independent political adverts during elections cannot be limited. In other words, political donors, whoever they may be, can spend as much money as they want promoting or trashing a candidate in any given election, behind the guise of an independent PAC and able to remain anonymous until well after the election they are seeking to engineer is over.
With thousands of fans heeding a call to donate to the new Colbert Super PAC, at first it ran a couple of ads asking to voters in last August’s Iowa Straw Poll (a poll held for Republican presidential candidates to test their support before the primaries begin) to vote for “Rick Parry – with an ‘A’”, in obvious attempt to lampoon former Republican frontrunner Rick Perry. But since then Colbert Super PAC has been a little quiet.
Not any more. Last week a poll in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary showed that Colbert (who has not put himself forward as a candidate) had five per cent of the state’s vote – one per cent more than genuine candidate John Huntsman. Aside from causing Huntsman to withdraw his candidacy, it also led Colbert to ponder a genuine run at the primary.
There was just one catch however: Super PACs cannot coordinate directly with candidates, making the Colbert Super PAC somewhat of an issue. The solution: to hand Colbert Super PAC over to The Daily Show host (and Colbert Report producer) Jon Stewart and rename it (yes, we said it in the first sentence) The Definitely Not Coordinating With Steven Colbert Super PAC!
Although Colbert is still teasing us as to whether he will actually put his name forward or not, the new PAC has just released its first advert. Voiced by actor John Lithgow and entitled ‘Attack In B Minor For Strings’, it paints current frontrunning Republican robot, sorry, candidate Mitt Romney as an asset-stripping serial killer. No, we are not making this up – see the advert below.
So on this side of the Atlantic we say: come on Armando Iannucci, Stewart Lee, Chris Morris, Charlie Brooker et al, enough with the finger wagging and the chuckling – let’s get together and actually tackle our own politibots head-on too!
