NP - How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?

[David Morris]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/stephen-colbert.html?_r=1

There used to be just two Stephen Colberts, and they were hard enough
to distinguish. The main difference was that one thought the other was
an idiot. The idiot Colbert was the one who made a nice paycheck by
appearing four times a week on “The Colbert Report” (pronounced in the
French fashion, with both t’s silent), the extremely popular fake news
show on Comedy Central. The other Colbert, the non-idiot, was the
47-year-old South Carolinian, a practicing Catholic, who lives with
his wife and three children in suburban Montclair, N.J., where,
according to one of his neighbors, he is “extremely normal.”

[...]

Lately, though, there has emerged a third Colbert. This one is a
version of the TV-show Colbert, except he doesn’t exist just on screen
anymore. He exists in the real world and has begun to meddle in it. In
2008, the old Colbert briefly ran for president, entering the
Democratic primary in his native state of South Carolina. (He hadn’t
really switched parties, but the filing fee for the Republican primary
was too expensive.) In 2010, invited by Representative Zoe Lofgren, he
testified before Congress about the problem of illegal-immigrant
farmworkers and remarked that “the obvious answer is for all of us to
stop eating fruits and vegetables.”

But those forays into public life were spoofs, more or less. The new
Colbert has crossed the line that separates a TV stunt from reality
and a parody from what is being parodied. In June, after petitioning
the Federal Election Commission, he started his own super PAC — a real
one, with real money. He has run TV ads, endorsed (sort of) the
presidential candidacy of Buddy Roemer, the former governor of
Louisiana, and almost succeeded in hijacking and renaming the
Republican primary in South Carolina. “Basically, the F.E.C. gave me
the license to create a killer robot,” Colbert said to me in October,
and there are times now when the robot seems to be running the
television show instead of the other way around.

[...]

In August, during the run-up to the Ames straw poll, some Iowans were
baffled to turn on their TVs and see a commercial that featured shots
of ruddy-cheeked farm families, an astronaut on the moon and an ear of
hot buttered corn. It urged viewers to cast write-in votes for Rick
Perry by spelling his name with an “a” — “for America.” A voice-over
at the end announced that the commercial had been paid for by an
organization called Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which
is the name of Colbert’s super PAC, an entity that, like any other
super PAC, is entitled to raise and spend unlimited amounts of soft
money in support of candidates as long as it doesn’t “coordinate” with
them, whatever that means. Of such super-PAC efforts, Colbert said,
“This is 100 percent legal and at least 10 percent ethical.”