Jon Stewart’s retirement from the Daily Show was hailed by the intellectual Left as a great loss, as was Stephen Colbert’s ending The Colbert Report. They were the Edward R. Murrows and Walter Winchells of our generation, voices of integrity who somehow rode the zeitgeist to report clear and honest analysis of political and media corruption and hypocrisy, just as happy to take on an Olbermann or a Begala as an O’Reilly or a Carlson. As America spiraled into partisan insanity throughout the years between MoveOn and The Tea Party, Stewart and later Colbert kept things in perspective. Today, though, American politics look dirtier and stupider than ever, and the voices of reason are retiring. This could be the tragedy that’s being advertised, sure, but certain signs point to more optimistic outcomes: specifically, a Stewart-Colbert Presidential campaign.
A Jon Stewart candidacy was never anything more than a joke in previous cycles. His stalwart advocacy of marijuana usage in his early career, and specifically his on-camera usage in Half-Baked, would have made for beautiful attack ads in previous cycles. But legalization and decriminalization has been the trend in the last few electoral cycles, and this is simply the next step beyond Obama’s “that was the point” admission of drug usage, a mockery of Bill Clinton’s famous denial.
Stephen Colbert’s candidacy in 2008 for President of South Carolina was in fact a Dadaist second step, after the release of his bestselling mockery of political memoirs I Am America and So Can You, going hand in hand with Stewart’s America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide To Democracy Inaction. They stepped up their own activism outside of and alongside their comedy with their dual Rally To Restore Sanity/March To Keep Fear Alive in October 2010, and for years their millions of fans have been trying to draft them both to run for President. The buzz of such a run has been going long enough that it’s all but forgotten by now, simply background noise, and that’s exactly the time to strike.
The US electoral system is a thing to behold, though not a thing to understand. At times it is high art, at times a beautiful realization of democratic populist ideals, at times a vote for prom queen, and at times soulless pandering. 2008 was a roiling mix of all four, a surprise after decades of simple pandering and corruption, but it was a freak occurrence, not a trend, and in the years since, the art and beauty and ideals have all once more disappeared. But we’ve been shocked by runaway candidacies and perfect political moments before.
First, the bad news. As the Democrat establishment is in lockstep behind Hillary, along with the centrist and right-wing Democrat voters, likely preventing a challenge from Joe Biden, it’s going to be a Clinton again taking the Democrats’ nomination. It’s time to stop waiting for Elizabeth Warren, who will disappoint us as much as Barack Obama has, (as will Rand Paul who will try to dismantle the NSA and shrink the government back down just small enough to fit in your uterus, leftist deserters should remember before casting a vote his way). It’s not that Warren’s not the Democrats’ best chance for reform, it’s simply that she’s a Harvard-Law-affiliated Senator with practical political concerns like re-election and legacy, the same afflictions that turned Barack Obama from the dove-ish community-organizing candidate of the poor and uninsured to the whistleblower-harassing President of perpetual war, Wall Street and insurance companies. And if Warren doesn’t go for it, the progressive left is looking to former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley as their golden boy, a man responsible for the racist surveillance program and hypocritical, illegal and racist funding freezes of schools in Baltimore City, whose last act as governor was legalizing fracking in the state. If you’ve never heard of him, think Mitt Romney without all the principles.
And speaking of Mitt Romney, he’s been loudly considering another run as Republican standard-bearer, and his only real challenge comes from another Bush, as all the old favorites (Bachmann, Huckabee, Santorum, et al) come out to vie for Tea Party backing and split the extreme right. And the rumbling from the Independent sphere is that billionaire former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, famous for banning oversize sodas and demolishing libraries, is the top choice. So in summary, the bad news is that we’re looking at 1992 all over again, a Clinton versus a Bush with a billionaire running as an outsider.
But in the wake of NSA revelations and the Senate Torture Report, the political climate may just be ripe for another moment of electoral brilliance. So the good news is that Jon Stewart’s new biography is on the shelves right next to Mike Huckabee’s and Leon Panetta’s, the first sign of any Presidential run. And where most elected officials aiming for the highest office take trade trips abroad to Asia in order to solidify their foreign affairs credentials, Stewart has spent time in Egypt with dissident comedians like Bassem Youssef, and met in New York with his Iranian counterparts Kambiz Hosseini and Saman Arbabi for ostensibly the same reason. Stewart and Colbert are both on record with a strong view on pretty much every major political issue of the day, though for Colbert it’s in satirical character. Their mockery of Dark Money through SuperPACs gave Stephen Colbert the opportunity to publicly sign over his own SuperPAC to Stewart, and the years since have allowed them ample time to stack their campaign coffers and then give it all away to charity. They are two household names with unlimited media capacities and the ability to raise a huge budget, and their dual retirement gives them the time to build the perfect campaign machine, able to jump out in front while the major party candidates are still recovering from necessarily bloody primary fights.
The thing about Presidential campaigns is that you’re fighting viciously for the worst job in the world, but not everybody is running to win. Some people are, and that’s where you get your pandering, the Romneys and Clintons and Obamas and Kerrys. But many are running as sacrificial lambs, giving up their privacy and security and serenity for a chance to shape the debate. This has been the Tea Party’s most significant accomplishment: they brought Sarah Palin to the top of the Republican ticket and they forever moved the right wing of American politics to the extreme right. And in doing so, without a similar left wing movement doing the same (Occupy failed to alter the party system, though they did alter national rhetoric slightly with The 99%), the Democrats have also moved rapidly to the right, leaving a vacuum on the left.
What is needed is someone with nothing to lose and nothing to prove, without a political career to consider, whose legacy is already secure, to bring a degree of honesty and clarity and sanity back into American political debate. Stewart and Colbert don’t need to win to forever change US politics, they just need to run, and in so doing, bring to political debate the same incisive, insightful expertise they brought to television.
