Students split on Colbert campaign

It took just eight days for 16-year-old Raj Vachhani’s Facebook group “1,000,000 Strong for… It took just eight days for 16-year-old Raj Vachhani’s Facebook group “1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T Colbert” to gain enough members to make its title true.

“We did it!” Vachhani said on the group’s wall. “It’s taken Obama’s 1,000,000 Strong Group more than nine months to get 381,000 members. We beat it in less than five days! We overtook them within five days!”

But the group was started in earnest.

Vachhani told the New York Times he “wanted to approximate the population of Mr. Colbert’s online supporters and find out what other fans thought of the satirist’s candidacy.”

Some Pitt students got right behind Vachhani, joining the group because they honestly support Colbert’s satirical campaign.

“I’m way beyond ‘considering’ voting for Stephen Colbert in the next election,” sophomore Jennifer Febbo said. “Unless one of the other candidates miraculously impresses me, I plan on writing Colbert in on my ballot for sure. I’m confident that he could do a way better job running the country than any of the previous jokers elected in the past few decades.”

College Democrats Vice President Lissa Geiger is also taking the Colbert campaign semi-seriously.

“I’m laughing at it right now, but if he actually files then I’ll be angry,” Geiger said. “I think he can screw up the election process if he is actually on the ballot, and it will ultimately disenfranchise thousands of South Carolinian voters who are attempting to have a bigger voice in who the Democratic nominee will be.”

Meanwhile, her colleague, College Democrats business manager Christy Bergstresser, is taking Colbert’s campaign in stride.

“I think his campaign is humorous,” Bergstresser said. “You can’t be a master of satire and then expect people to take your run for office seriously. I think the overwhelming support he is getting from people is due to the fact that they know this won’t really materialize into anything of substance.”

Pitt’s College Republicans were not available for comment.

Assistant professor of political science Jennifer Nicoll Victor said she shares Bergstresser’s light-hearted approach to the campaign.

“I think it’s less likely to have an impact in terms of outcome, but it’s possible that a campaign like that can have an impact on voter turnout,” Victor said.

Victor added that Colbert’s popularity does not necessarily reflect dissatisfaction with the official presidential nominees.

“I think it’s more likely that there’s a heightened sense of awareness around this election. It may be a reaction to the wide-spread dissatisfaction with the current political state of the world,” Victor said.

“On the other hand, Colbert has a slightly conservative bearing and, polls show that Republicans are more dissatisfied with their options than Democrats are.”

Mark Kemp, who teaches a class on satire in Pitt’s English department, noted, however, that the actor who appears on “The Colbert Report” may not be the same as the real-life Colbert.

“Colbert is effective because he’s so good at mimicking his target,” Kemp said. “It isn’t the actual, biological Stephen Colbert we’re seeing; he’s a persona. We don’t know the real Stephen Colbert.”

The Colbert viewers see pokes fun at today’s politicians. This, Kemp says, is part of why people are drawn to his show.

“We live in a ridiculous society and our political campaigns are ridiculous and everyone believes that. We need to keep a sort of humorous attitude to it otherwise we’d just go insane,” Kemp said.

Colbert isn’t the first comedian to take a stab at American politics this far. According to Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison, Mark Twain and comedian Pat Paulsen have both started satirical presidential campaigns.

“Most dark-comic candidacies emerge in grim times,” Morrison wrote yesterday. “[Paulsen] ran for president as the Vietnam War was rupturing the country. The nation saw a TV war overseas and wall-to-wall TV campaigning at home, and Paulsen mocked by imitation. The man who produced Paulsen’s campaign ‘special’ so impressed real politicians that he wound up being hired for real political events, and then by the Nixon White House.”

So why do satirical campaigns capture people’s attention?

“There is a lot to make fun of,” Kemp said. “I think maybe it actually shows that we want to take things seriously but that it’s hard to in the reality we live in. Therefore, people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert make more sense to us than the real news.”

Professor of English and film studies Jane Feuer has a similar take on it: “I do think that there’s very little difference between real news shows and satiric ones, so perhaps there’s not much difference between real and fake campaigns,” she said.