A Silly Campaign by a Serious Performer

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/arts/stephen-colbert-stirs-up-political-campaign-and-media.html?_r=1&hp

Stephen Colbert teasing South Carolina about a run for the presidency is becoming one of America’s great political traditions, right up there with awkward photographs of candidates eating corn dogs at the Iowa State Fair.

On Thursday night he said he was setting up an exploratory committee after a Public Policy Polling survey put him ahead of the Republican presidential hopeful Jon M. Huntsman Jr. In 2007 Mr. Colbert made even more elaborate forays into a possible candidacy during the Democratic primaries, outpolling Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico at the time, and Christopher J. Dodd, the senator from Connecticut. He didn’t get on the ballot then, and he won’t this year. (He missed the Nov. 1 deadline, and South Carolina doesn’t provide a space for write-in candidates.) But of course that’s not the point. His latest presidential flirtation is an attempt at something even more ambitious: making campaign-finance laws funny.

By putting Jon Stewart in charge of his “super” political action committee, renamed the Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC, Mr. Colbert provides a study in the absurdity of laws governing campaign spending. It’s what’s fresh about a Colbert joke that seems a little tired on the second go-round. We’ve seen these elaborate teases and the celebratory balloons before. Then again, the potential (and unpredictability) of Mr. Colbert’s stunt derives from his uncanny ability to draw the rest of the world into his comic conceits.