CNN has dropped to fourth place in the cable news business it invented. And Fox continues to rise while under fire from the administration.

CNN, which invented the cable news network more than two decades ago, will hit a new competitive low with its prime-time programs in October, finishing fourth – and last – among the cable news networks with the audience that all the networks rely on for their advertising. The official monthly numbers will be finalized at 4 p.m. Monday and will include results from Friday. CNN executives conceded that will not change the competitive standing for the month. CNN will still be last in prime time.

That means CNN’s programs were behind not only Fox News and MSNBC, but even its own sister network HLN (formerly Headline News.) Three of its four shows between 7 and 11 p.m. finished fourth and last among the cable news networks. That was the first time CNN had finished that poorly with its prime-time shows.

The results demonstrate once more the apparent preference of viewers for opinion-oriented shows from the news networks in prime time. CNN has steered opinion hosts like Nancy Grace to HLN, while maintaining more news-oriented shows on CNN itself. When news events are not being intensely followed, CNN executives acknowledge, viewers seem to be looking for partisan views more than objective coverage.

Individually, the CNN shows were beaten resoundingly by all the Fox News programs, but also lost to all of the MSNBC programs, including a repeat of Keith Olbermann’s 8 p.m. edition of “Countdown,” which beat the 10 p.m. hour of CNN’s signature prime-time program, “Anderson Cooper 360.” Again that was a first. Mr. Cooper had 211,000 viewers to 223,000 for Mr. Olbermann’s repeat. That meant Mr. Cooper finished fourth and last in the 10 p.m. hour because, besides being well behind the leader, Greta Van Susteren, who had 538,000 viewers, he was also beaten by a repeat of Nancy Grace’s 8 p.m. show on HLN, which averaged 222,000.

[...]

CNN executives emphasized that the network continues to draw more viewers than all its competitors except Fox News when all hours of the day are counted. CNN released a statement Monday saying, “CNN’s ratings are always going to be more dependent on the news environment, much more so than opinion-based programming especially in prime time.”

Now, of course, none of this answers the question as to whether Fox is a news network or a partisan outlet.  (In my opinion — granted, as someone who has all but stopped watching television news in recent years — it’s both.)  But it does show what the people want to see.

I personally find most of the cable news hosts insipid, if not grating.  (The exceptions, ironically, are the faux anchors Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who manage to be smart and charming even while being partisan.)  But it’s human nature to prefer routine.  So, people who are in the mood for public affairs chat during prime time will naturally gravitate to their favorite news personality on at that hour and make that appointment viewing.

Indeed, the preference for host-based, periodic program over “whatever’s happening now” goes beyond news.  ESPN’s most popular programs are “Pardon the Interruption” and its lead-in “Around the Horn.”  Viewers — certainly, this viewer — are annoyed when “PTI” is pre-empted for some live sporting event such as the Little League World series or, say, women’s golf.   And the music channels all moved from showing videos of popular songs to more routine, familiar programming.

This is even more understandable in the Internet age.  People who are interested in news — whether about public affairs, sports, or the weather — can get it when they want it, how they want it.  There’s no longer much point in waiting for the 6:30 or 11:00 news.   Even shows like “SportsCenter,” which were a godsend 20 years ago, are now boring blather since it’s an hour talking about things viewers knew about hours earlier.  Indeed, it’s gotten so bad that they chopped off the last five minutes of “PTI” and hide it somewhere during the ensuing “SportsCenter” episode, forcing people to either miss the end of the show or watch a show they otherwise wouldn’t.  (Or, in my case, TiVo “PTI” for 90 minutes and fast-forward though both the commercials and non-”PTI” segments of “SportsCenter.”)

Postscript:  In terms of sheer business, it’s conceivable that CNN is making a good decision here.  They’ve essentially divided their network into two components, so  CNN and HLN both contribute to the bottom line.  The question is whether the amount of money spent on retaining name brand hosts 1) pays for itself in higher ratings and 2) offsets the cost of covering the news.

President Obama has gone on virtually every network but Fox in a weekend tour de force that continues tonight:

The president’s week-long media blitz has left no other network behind. The president has appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Bloomberg and CNBC and will appear on five public affairs talk shows on Sunday: ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” CBS’s “Face the Nation,” NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CNN’s “State of the Union” and Univision’s “Al Punto, con Jorge Ramos.” And he’s doing CBS’ “Late Night with David Letterman” on Monday.

This has some wondering if he’s not overdoing it a mite:

With or without an appearance on Fox, the president’s media blitz is without precedent. Presidents rarely appear on Sunday talk shows; none has ever appeared on so many in one week. And no sitting president has ever been a guest on “Late Night with David Letterman.”

Dana Perino, who served as White House press secretary for President George W. Bush, says the president risks “diluting the bully pulpit” by doing so many interviews in such a short period of time. “The next time they really want to pack a punch, they might have to ask [former House majority leader] Tom DeLay if they can cut in on ‘Dancing with the Stars,’” Perino told ABC News.

It’s a concern echoed by Dee Dee Myers, former White House press secretary for President Bill Clinton. “More isn’t always more when it comes to a president’s words,” Myers told Politico. “This is something they need to start to be concerned about.”

The White House dismisses talk of overexposure. “The president is seeking opportunities to speak to a diverse audience about the importance of comprehensive health insurance reform,” Earnest said. “The more that people learn about what he actually supports, the more people support the plan.”

Howie Kurtz sums up the president’s ubiquity:

Sure, this is a president who has dissected basketball brackets on ESPN, gone for burgers with Brian Williams, showed Steve Kroft his swing set, dissed Kanye West (off the record) with CNBC and ordered a general to shave Stephen Colbert’s head. By that standard, Obama’s Sunday blitz was a mere throat-clearing that, as it turned out, produced little in the way of big news. And some journalists — even as they continue to clamor for access — say he is diluting the product.

“It’s simple,” explains White House communications director Anita Dunn. “In an increasingly fragmented audience that gets information from a number of different sources, putting a huge amount of his time behind one medium increases our ability to really break through and get a message out. The effect of one interview, given how rapidly the news environment moves, doesn’t last as long as it used to.”

But is there such a thing as too many?

While the White House plan was for Obama to focus primarily on health care and Afghanistan, he broke no new ground on either subject, repeating points he has made many times. Some topics varied — “State of the Union” host John King asked about North Korea; “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos asked about the ACORN scandal — but the game plans were strikingly similar.

The first clips released by the networks — and picked up in news stories — showed the hosts were especially interested in a subject the president has been trying to avoid. They all asked about the recent chatter that some of his critics are motivated by racism. And Obama’s answers took on a certain sameness.

Ronald Reagan famously managed the message by giving very controlled access and basically giving the press no choice but to run with the sound byte of the day since if the president says only two sentences that day, whatever he said is by definition news. But that was before multiple 24/7 cable networks, blogs, TMZ, and all the rest. Maybe the world has just changed.

Veteran Democratic communications strategist Chris Lehane agreed, arguing that for Barack Obama there is no such thing as overexposure. “It’s the Angelina Jolie phenomenon,” said Lehane, a former spokesman for Vice President Al Gore. “People don’t get tired of seeing Angelina Jolie.” Is Lehane comparing President Obama to Angelina Jolie? “Yes. He is a natural talent,” Lehane said. “People do connect with him.”

The president as sex symbol famous for being famous is perhaps just the natural evolution of things.

Before turning in last night, we watched Monday’s “Colbert Report” which featured this segment on the increasing use of tasers by police forces, including on helpless old women:

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Current Events – Tasers
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Tasers

This morning, I see that several people are commenting on a story about Mobile, Alabama police tasering a deaf, retarded man on the grounds he had locked himself in a public bathroom and was carrying a dangerous weapon — an umbrella.

Officers who used pepper spray and a Taser to remove a man from a store bathroom found out only later he was deaf and mentally disabled and didn’t understand they wanted him to open the door, police said Tuesday. A spokesman for the Mobile Police Department said the officers’ actions were justified because the man was armed with a potential weapon — an umbrella.

But relatives of Antonio Love, 37, have asked for a formal investigation and said they plan to sue both the police and the store. “I want justice,” Love’s mother, Phyllis Love, said Tuesday.

The woman said her son hears only faintly, has the mental capacity of a 10-year-old and didn’t realize that it was the police who were trying enter the bathroom. “He thought the devil was out there trying to get in to get him,” she said.

Antonio Love, in a written statement and in a television interview given in sign language about the confrontation, said he had a badly upset stomach last Friday and went into a Dollar General store to use the restroom.

Police spokesman Christopher Levy said Tuesday store workers called officers complaining that a man had been in the bathroom for more than an hour with the door locked. Officers knocked on the door and identified themselves, but the person didn’t respond. Officers used a tire iron to open the door, but the man pushed back to keep it shut. Officers saw the umbrella and sprayed pepper spray through a crack trying to subdue the man, Levy said. They shot the man with a Taser when they finally got inside, he said.

Officers didn’t realize Love was deaf or had mental problems until he showed them a card he carries in his wallet, Levy said. He was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct, but officers released him and took him home after a magistrate refused to issue a warrant.

Levy said officers were justified in using force against Love since he had an umbrella. “The officers really worked within the limits of our level-of-force policy,” he said. “We had no information about who this guy was.”

Now, I’m less apoplectic about the particular case than Paleo Pat, digby, or William Grigg because I actually buy the police explanation that they had no idea who this guy was or that he was disabled. All they knew is that a large man was locked in the bathroom for an inordinately long time and had refused the demands of store management to leave — necessitating calling the police to begin with — and that he was then refusing police orders and pushing back on the door as police were trying to enter.

That’s suspicious activity.

It’s not the police department’s responsibility to know that an unidentified person they’re called out to respond to is disabled.  And the fact that Love thinks the devil is attacking him in bathrooms and that he is unable to cope with his surroundings is perhaps an indication that he shouldn’t be out unsupervised.

The officers in question undoubtedly acted as they were trained to do.

No, the problem, as in the Henry Louis Gates case, is a police culture that sees all non-police as potentially dangerous perps and that demands instant respect and obedience from the public.  Watch any random episode of “Cops” and you’ll see outrageous police conduct by officers who know that they’re being filmed for television.   Police increasingly see themselves as soldiers in a war zone and behave with an arrogant, bullying attitude toward the citizenry even in clearly non-dangerous situations.

Stephen Colbert takes a lot of grief from my side of the aisle for his partisanship but his USO trip to Camp Victory in Iraq deserves nothing but praise. Here’s Campbell Robertson’s NYT writeup from a couple days back:

War, as things go, is a fairly unironic exercise. Sure, there are endless incongruities to be found and parodied in the speeches about war from politicians, generals and heads of state. But war itself — the dirty, dangerous business of soldiers on the ground — seems to be about as earnest a trade as you can find.

Into this comes Mr. Colbert. He is taping four episodes of “The Colbert Report,” the Comedy Central show featuring his egotistical, fake-macho, nationalist blowhard alter ego, in Baghdad this week. It’s the first time in the history of the U.S.O. that a full-length nonnews show has been filmed, edited and broadcast from a combat zone.

The week of shows, taped a day or two before they are broadcast, is called “Operation Iraqi Stephen: Going Commando,” and it has a pretty fancy guest list (in addition to General Odierno, and the president, whose appearance was taped ahead) that includes Iraq’s deputy prime minister. But there is also something kind of meta about the whole thing. Mr. Colbert’s entire career is based on being gleefully insincere, a man who literally wraps himself in the flag to the screaming of majestic computer-generated eagles.

On the other hand he is unquestionably a real supporter of the troops, raising money through donorschoose.org for school supplies for children of soldiers, through his WristStrong bracelets for the Yellow Ribbon Fund, which helps injured veterans, and by donating to the U.S.O. proceeds from iTunes downloads of this week’s episodes.

So it was easy to wonder if, given the setting, he would be a little less mock Bill O’Reilly and a bit more risk-free Rich Little.

Any doubt was dispersed the minute Mr. Colbert ran out onstage wearing a business suit made of Army camouflage and, shortly afterward, declared himself the only person man enough finally to declare victory in Iraq. (General Odierno, whom Mr. Colbert compared to Shrek, diplomatically talked that declaration down.)

Mr. Colbert himself does not seem to be fazed by this seemingly tricky balancing act. Neither he nor his character knows what it’s like to be a soldier, he said in an interview here Saturday night. Only, his character thinks he knows.  “Think of certain reporters who lose themselves in their own self-importance and accidentally give away troop movements and get kicked out of the country,” he said in a not particularly oblique reference to Geraldo Rivera.

“The best way I can show gratitude is to do my show the best I can and make them laugh,” he said. “If I tried to tailor my material to people in the Army, there’d be two things. A, that’d be patronizing. And B, I’d be wrong.”

I watch the show via DVR-delay and am thus always a night behind.  I watched the first episode last night, though, and think he got the tone exactly right.  Getting a military haircut from Gen. Odierno was fairly amusing and a big hit with the troops.

As Robertson noted, Colbert proclaimed that only he had the “balls” to declare that we’d won the war in Iraq.  That was, of course, a joke — false bravado by Colbert’s character.  But for a liberal comic known to be opposed to the war to go to the war zone and submit himself to the brutal scrutiny of young soldiers takes a set as well.  It’s on par with Johnny Cash going to San Quentin and proclaiming, “I think I understand a little bit about how you feel about some things. It’s none of my business about how you feel about some other things. And I don’t give a damn about how you feel about some other things” before singing a song describing what it’s like to be there.

Richard Florida passes along this snippet from The illustrated History of Canada:

American draft dodgers in Canada were far outnumbered by the young Canadians who joined U.S. forces to fight in Vietnam.

This factoid may be in that category Stephen Colbert would call “truthy” and Dan Rather would call “false but true.”

Canada did not participate in the Vietnam War for a variety of reasons.  Still, “about 30,000″ Canadian citizens volunteered to fight with U.S. and other Western forces and 110 of them were killed in action and have their names on the Vietnam Memorial. According to Wikipedia, “Canadian immigration statistics show that 20,000 to 30,000 draft-eligible American men came to Canada as immigrants during the Vietnam era; estimates of the total number of American citizens who moved to Canada due to their opposition to the war range from 50,000 to 125,000.”

Regardless, the fact remains that a huge number of Canadian citizens volunteered to fight in a controversial war and a not insignificant number died there.  They, along with others in the Anglosphere (sorry, Québécois) have long been America’s most stalwart wartime allies, willing to pick up a rifle when others would not.

So says E.D. Kain:

Fox News is simply not conservative.  The fact of the matter is, I find NPR and even News Hour more conservative than Fox – but in a different sense, I suppose, than the standard boiler plate conservatism that has so infested American politics.  What I mean to say is that the conservatism of Fox News tends to be wrapped up in loud, divisive, trashy television that is cheap and ugly and reactionary and essentially all things distasteful that conservatives should look at with scorn and antipathy.  The measured, reserved, thoughtful and culturally sensible tone of NPR is far more conservative.  I’d rather my kids listen to it than watch Glenn Beck.  I’d rather they listen to Fresh Air than Rush Limbaugh.  Why have conservatives let go of the high culture war?  Why have they conceded defeat there – in the arts, in literature, in music – trading it instead for trash television and cheap rhetoric?

Now, I’d disagree with the counter-premise that the Left is somehow more highbrow.  I don’t know that MSNBC is any less histrionic than FOX or that lefty talk radio is sweetness and light — or even that every show on FOX is lowbrow (”Special Report” was worth watching in Brit Hume’s day, as was “Fox News Sunday”).  And comparing mainstream NPR programming with unabashedly partisan shows is rather unfair.  But much of what passes for conservative commentary has certainly strayed from the path of William F. Buckley, Jr.

The particular case of Glenn Beck is interesting.  I watched a couple episodes of his Headline News show before growing bored and haven’t seen his Fox show, aside from a handful of clips on the blogs and other television shows.   From what I gather, he comes across as a raving lunatic who’s afraid of his own shadow.

The reason this fascinates me is that, perhaps three or four years ago, I was a regular listener to his talk radio show, which was on in the afternoons when I was making the 45-minute commute from my then-job to my then-home.  He was a bit more emotional than the typical show host, which I ascribed to his personal story of recovery from a series of poor personal choices, but seemed like a genuinely decent fellow trying to make sense of the world.  This was well after the shock of the 9/11 attacks, so the subsequent stylistic change is not part of the “everything” that changed on that fateful day.   So, I’m honestly flummoxed as to where the current incarnation of Beck came from.

Meanwhile, the leading lights of liberal commentary, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, are taking the approach pioneered by Rush Limbaugh of making fun of the other side in a way that’s genuinely entertaining.   They don’t come across as afraid of or hating conservatives but as simply bemused by their opponents. [To clarify, I'm not arguing that Stewart and Colbert are Limbaugh imitators; they're not.  But Limbaugh was a pioneer in combining political commentary and humor in a way to attract a mass audience on a weekdaily basis.]

Regardless, I’d have to agree that I’d much rather spend an afternoon with your average NPR host — or, goodness, Stewart or Colbert — than most of the ranting loons passing themselves off as the voice of conservatism these days.

While their agenda is different from mine, I’ve generally seen the Center for American Progress as a thoughtful, center-left institution. They employ talented, decent folks like Steve Clemons and Steve Coll (now their president and CEO). Think Progress, the blog of their “Action Fund,” has generally followed suit, despite most of its authors being quite young and thus not having had their enthusiasm tempered much by wisdom.

But, of late, Think Progress has been writing at the Media Matters level of hackishness. Take, for example, assistant editor Satyam Khanna’s piece “McCain Refuses To Condemn Ingraham’s Attacks On His Daughter,” which is currently making the rounds at memeorandum.

Khanna repeatedly uses the phrase “hate radio” to describe rather benign talk shows, including Laura Ingraham’s. Unless her style has changed drastically since last I listened, she’s much more polite than anything one is likely to find on, say, Air America.  Indeed, despite the occasional sophomoric insult, such as seen in the Meghan McCain flap, Ingraham is much tamer than Keith Olbermann, Jon Stewart, or Stephen Colbert.

The piece continues, charging, “in the past, McCain has courted the extreme right of the GOP, granting an interview to Ingraham as late as October 2008. Throughout the presidential election, McCain, long considered too liberal by the extreme right, frequently appeared on hate radio shows, and he has a history of defending the bigoted remarks of right wingers.”

What is it that makes Ingraham part of the “extreme right?”  The other “hate radio shows” linked include Hugh Hewitt’s and Bill Bennett’s.  What makes them hateful?  We’re not exactly talking about Michael Savage here, much less David Duke.

It seems “hate radio” is a favorite Think Progress buzzword;  Google returns 5,770 results on their site.  Apparently, any Republican-leaning talk show qualifies.

Which “bigoted remarks of right wingers” did McCain defend?  The link takes us to McCain’s condemning remarks made by John Hagee but noting that “I will say that he said that his words were taken out of context, he defends his position. I hope that maybe you’d give him a chance to respond. He says he has never been anti-Catholic, but I repudiate the words that create that impression.”

As to why McCain didn’t weigh in on Ingraham’s jibes at his daughter?  Who knows?  Maybe he figures Meghan’s doing just fine on her own?  Or, maybe, since she’s no longer his little girl but rather someone casting herself as a political pundit, he figures it would undermine her if he weighed in?

Stephen Colbert’s quixotic quest for the presidency–in South Carolina–has been thwarted by the Democratic Party.

Stephen Colbert’s satirical run for the presidency has run into its first roadblock — his bid to be on the ballot in the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary was rejected on Thursday.

The party’s executive council voted 13-3 to refuse Colbert’s application for a spot on the ballot.

“The general sense of the council was that he wasn’t a serious candidate and that was why he wasn’t selected to be on the ballot,” said Joe Werner, the party’s director. “There was discussion — I wouldn’t call it a heated debate — but there was discussion about it.”

Julian Sanchez suggests that this might be because he might win it:

Am I alone in suspecting that one serious consideration behind the decision to keep Stephen Colbert off the South Carolina Democratic primary ballot was that he might well win it? Or, at the very least, beat many of the “serious” candidates? After all, that’s the only way adding him to the ballot would help him “make a mockery” of the process, as SC Dems fear.

Frankly, I doubt that this was the case. There’s actually a set of criteria that the South Carolina Democratic party has for President, which are described in the article above as:

The Democrats had to decide whether they considered Colbert to be a bona fide Democrat who is nationally viable and has spent time campaigning in the state.

Given that Colbert has firmly announced that he is only running in South Carolina and that, to my knowledge, he has not done any campaigning, he simply didn’t meet the minimum criteria necessary to be on the Democratic ballot in South Carolina. That may not be the most subversive opinion in the world, but it is, alas, probably the correct one.

Update: Apparently, I was incorrect about Stephen Colbert not actively campaigning in South Carolina.

Stephen Colbert has filed for the South Carolina Democratic primary.

Stephen Colbert’s fanciful White House bid took a real step Thursday. It’s up to South Carolina Democrats to decide whether to take him seriously.

Colbert, who poses as a conservative talk-show host on the Comedy Central cable network, filed to get on the ballot as a Democratic candidate in his native South Carolina. His campaign paid a $2,500 filing fee just before the noon deadline, said state Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler.

Whether he’ll appear on the ballot will be decided by party officials later Thursday. The host of “The Colbert Report” doesn’t appear to meet the party’s viable candidate qualification. And it’s unclear if he would meet the requirement that candidates actively campaign in the state.

Colbert did appear Sunday at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, telling several hundred fans he would, if elected, “crush the state of Georgia.” He also received a key to the capital city and the mayor declared him South Carolina’s “favorite son.”

Unless the primary ballot will consist only of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, Colbert would appear as “viable” as anyone. Certainly, he’s got a better shot at attracting support than Dennis Kucinich and he’s polling ahead of Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd, too.

It’s apparently silly season at Rasmussen, which continues to release results of absurd polling questions.

Given a choice between Colbert running as a Democrat and Republican Congressman Ron Paul, 36% of voters prefer Colbert while Paul attracts 32%. Twenty-one percent (21%) say they’d vote for some other candidate while 10% are not sure.

If the choice is between Colbert as a Republican and Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich, it’s Colbert 37%, Kucinich 32%. Nineteen percent (19%) would vote for some other candidate and 11% are not sure.

In each match-up, Colbert’s adversary attracts little more than half his partisan base. Paul attracts just 51% of GOP voters. Kucinich attracts 53% of Democrats.

So, in a race between a well known television comedian and two largely unknown politicians, the comedian wins? Who’d o’ thunk?

Steven Taylor guesses that it’s “no fun to be the real candidates who are considered joke-worthy enough themselves to be included in the poll in the first place.” But, hey, it’s publicity.

Comedian Stephen Colbert is doing quite well in the latest Rasmussen poll.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that Colbert is preferred by 13% of voters as an independent candidate challenging Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Rudy Giuliani. The survey was conducted shortly after Colbert’s surprise announcement that he is lusting for the Oval Office. The result is similar when Fred Thompson is the Republican in the three-way race. With Thompson as the GOP candidate, Colbert earns 12% of the vote.

Interesting if silly; after all, Colbert isn’t running as an independent and he wouldn’t actually get nearly that many votes in a real election. Not only would many of these people not vote, period, but those who do almost invariably wind up making a choice between the major party candidates.

More enlightening, perhaps:

Colbert does particularly well with the younger voters most likely to be watching his show and therefore most aware of his myriad presidential-like qualities. In the match-up with Giuliani and Clinton, Colbert draws 28% of likely voters aged 18-29. He draws 31% of that cohort when his foes are Thompson and Clinton. In both match-ups, Colbert has more support with young voters than the GOP candidate.

The crosstabs are available only to premium members and no comparable figure for the Democrats is included in the summary. But, clearly, the under 30 crowd prefers comedians to Republicans.

Comedian Stephen Colbert’s truthy run for the presidency may run afoul of federal election rules.

Federal law bars corporations from contributing to candidates, either through donations or in-kind contributions such as free use of goods or services. Media organizations are permitted to feature presidential candidates in covering campaigns. But no precedent exists for a television network promoting and fostering a candidacy of one of its own talk-show hosts, said Lawrence M. Noble, a former general counsel for the Federal Election Commission. And comedian Pat Paulsen’s 1968 candidacy predated current campaign finance regulations.

“The real problem comes in the fact that he actually has his own show, talking about his campaign, paid for by a network,” Noble said. “These are the kind of things on slow days you’d debate until the late afternoon at the FEC, but there are serious questions that come up. In theory, he could end up having some campaign finance problems.”

While he has talked about his candidacy publicly only in character — as the combative faux-talk-show host who favors “truthiness” on “The Colbert Report” — Colbert is taking formal steps that are consistent with an actual presidential candidacy. He has begun collecting signatures to get himself placed on both the Democratic and Republican presidential primary ballots in South Carolina. And while he has said he’s in the race to run, not to win, he has talked about trying to win delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

“I think a lot of people are asking whether — they say, ‘Is this, is this real,’ you know?” Colbert said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And to which I would say to everybody, this is not a dream, OK? You’re not going to wake up from this, OK? I’m far realer than Sam Brownback, let me put it that way.”

After being alerted to a possible election law violation, he and the network dropped plans to post signature forms on Comedy Central’s Web site, and instead created a bare-bones Web site for official campaign activity, www.colbert08.org. On Thursday’s program, he held up what he said was a letter from a Washington election lawyer, and made the legal framework part of his schtick. “In accepting corporate money, I promise to respect federal election laws the same way I respect the must-shower-before-swimming law at the Y,” Colbert said. “As a candidate, I am under no obligation to promote the zesty, robust taste of Doritos brand tortilla chips, regardless of how great a snack they may be for lunchtime, munch time, anytime.”

He also said that, because of election laws, Doritos would technically be sponsoring not his candidacy but his program’s coverage of his candidacy. “It’s illegal for my crunch money here to pay for the campaign, but it is legal for it to pay for my show, and the show can report on my campaign,” he said. “Host: ‘Eat them.’ Candidate: ‘I just happen to like ‘em.’ “

Every time this sort of nonsense comes up, I’m reminded of the idiocy of our election laws and the harm done by John McCain in trying to fix the system. Frankly, I’d rather have my candidates openly sponsored by Doritos than spending four nights a week raising money in secret and then continue that practice while in office.

Stephen Colbert has surged ahead of Bill Richardson and within a half point of Joe Biden in the latest Public Opinion Strategies poll.

He’s been “in” the race for less than a week, and already faux-pundit Stephen Colbert has surged ahead of longtime candidate Gov. Bill Richardson in one national poll gauging the race for the Democratic nod for president. And watch out Joe Biden!

The Public Opinion Strategies poll this past weekend of 1,000 likely primary voters that included Colbert’s name — as both a Democrat and Republican, as he wishes — found him drawing 2.3 percent in the Dem race nationally (though he is threatening to run only in his native South Carolina). This put his ahead of Richardson (2.1 percent), Rep. Dennis Kucininch (2.1) and, of course, Sen. Mike Gravel. And he trails Sen. Biden by just a tad (he’s at 2.7 percent). Of course he has a long way to go to catch up with the three frontrunners (you know who they are).

But Colbert fares less well among his natural constituency on the GOP side, where he draws less than one percent.

Granted that all these numbers are within the margin of sampling error, it’s still rather amusing.

Stephen Colbert is running for president.

Stephen Colbert has announced his candidacy for president on “The Colbert Report,” tossing his satirical hat into the ring of an already crowded race.

“I shall seek the office of the president of the United States,” Colbert said Tuesday on his Comedy Central show as red, white and blue balloons fell around him.

Colbert, 43, had recently satirized the coyness of would-be presidential candidates by refusing to disclose whether he would seek the country’s highest office — a refusal that often came without any prompting. Shortly before making the announcement, Colbert appeared on “The Daily Show” (the show that spawned Colbert’s spin-off) and played cagey, claiming he was only ready to consider a White House bid. He entered the studio set pulled by a bicycle pedaled by Uncle Sam and quickly pulled out a bale of hay and a bottle of beer to show that he was “an Average Joe.”

Colbert said his final decision would be announced on a “more prestigious show,” which turned out to be his own. “After nearly 15 minutes of soul-searching, I have heard the call,” said Colbert.

While his candidacy is obviously a joke, I’m not sure he wouldn’t be formidable. Celebrity goes a long way in politics and he’s got a huge following. Plus, he’d have the advantage of getting votes both from people who agree with the things he says and from those who realize he’s doing satire.

Newshogger shamanic uses the occasion to get some digs in at Ron Paul supporters, quipping, “The biggest difference between the Paul and Colbert evangelists? Colbert’s fans know their guy’s candidacy is a joke.”

UPDATE: Here’s the video, courtesy Comedy Central.

Jonathan Chait has a longish cover piece in TNR entitled, “The Left’s New Machine: How the netroots became the most important mass movement in U.S. politics.” What particularly struck me was this:

The most significant fact of American political life over the last three decades is that there is a conservative movement and there has not been a liberal movement. Liberalism, to be sure, has all the component parts that conservatism has: think tanks, lobbying groups, grassroots activists, and public intellectuals. But those individual components, unlike their counterparts on the conservative side, do not see one another as formal allies and don’t consciously act in concert. If you asked a Heritage Foundation fellow or an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal how his work fits into the movement, he would immediately understand that you meant the conservative movement. If you asked the same question of a Brookings Institute fellow or a New York Times editorial writer, he would have no idea what you were talking about.

The netroots have begun to change all that. Its members are intensely aware of their connection to each other and their place in relation to the Democratic Party. The word “movement” itself–once rare among mainstream liberals–is a regular feature of their discourse. They call themselves “the people-powered movement,” or “the progressive movement,” or, often, simply “the movement.”

That had been no liberal “movement” until the last few years is something that had not really occurred to me. Presumably, it’s partly a function of the fact that left-of-center politics predominated in most of the important institutions until recently. While the presidency was usually Republican, Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for decades and usually had the Senate as well. The influential newspapers and television networks and elite universities were substantially left-of-center.

The Left, therefore, didn’t need a “movement” for the same reason they didn’t need a Rush Limbaugh or a Fox News: They dominated elite discussion and got their voice out without difficulty.

That all began to change in the 1990s. Ironically, it happened during the tenure of — and partially in response to — a Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Talk radio became a beacon for disaffected conservatives, providing an alternative to the mainstream press. Toward the end of the decade, Fox News arose with “Fair and Balanced” coverage that skewed right, especially when compared to their competitors. While the left still dominated academe and the most influential newspapers, they couldn’t command an audience anymore.

Chait traces the rise of the Netroots to the furor over the 2000 election recount process. Interestingly, though, the blogosphere took off after the 9/11 attacks and was initially dominated by right-of-center voices. (National security hawks although, generally, not social conservatives.) Sometime during the run-up to the 2004 election, though, that had changed. As MyDD’s Chris Bowers and others have documented, several sites on the left had become communitarian hubs of activism. Chait profiles several of them but myDD, DailyKos, and Eschaton were and likely still are the most important.

Whether because of differing personalities or the fact that the Republicans controlled the presidency and both Houses of Congress or, likely, some combination, a right-Netroots has yet to emerge. RedState was an attempt to created a DailyKos-style community on the Right but it doesn’t have anywhere near the influence. Recently, it was absorbed into the Salem Media Eagle Publishing/TownHall corporate empire, lessening its impact as an independent hub. With minor exceptions such as Porkbusters, there simply isn’t much activism among the major right-of-center blogs.

I’ve had offers to join various PACs and on-line campaigns and have declined. Frankly, I have no desire for OTB to become part of some “movement” where every post needs to be crafted in accordance with some Master Agenda. I’ve never aspired to be more than a commentator here, giving (usually) quick takes on things that capture my interest and having a discussion with my audience. As I’ve brought co-authors aboard, I’ve kept them within the same broad ideological framework but, mostly, the same analytical tradition.

Duncan “Atrios” Black, who (via Memeorandum) first drew my attention to the Chait piece, isn’t a fan of punditry for its own sake:

I’m all for high minded academic research, though I’m not sure what that has to do with largely fluffy political opinion magazines, but I do object to those who imagine that they think their grand thoughts without concern for outcomes. It’s grotesque absurdity that pundits and opinion journalists spend their time writing about things even though they don’t care about the outcomes. What an odd way to spend one’s time. It’s just a conceit by those who like to imagine themselves to be above the fray, that their subjective (if well-researched) opinions are imbued with the Truth.

In my own case, at least, I care very much for the outcomes. To the extent that I’m a public intellectual, I hope my writing changes some minds. At the same time–while I don’t pretend to be “objective” or lack partisan leanings–I call ‘em like I see ‘em, even if doing so infinitesimally weakens the Greater Cause. Indeed, from what I’ve read of Black’s writings, he’s in that boat as well, showing no reluctance to direct some profanity-laced invective at Democrats who annoy him.

Kevin Drum draws my attention to this passage from Chait:

Liberals made several attempts to recreate the conservative message machine — Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo, and countless others attempted and failed to create talk-radio programs. Most people concluded from these failures that liberals simply didn’t want partisan vitriol of the sort offered up by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. They wanted high-minded discussions of the sort found on National Public Radio. Nonconservatives, wrote The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg in 2003, “wouldn’t think it was fun to listen to expressions of raw contempt for conservatives.”

This analysis, shared by nearly all observers just a few years ago, turns out to be completely wrong. Maybe an audience for raw partisan liberal attacks existed all along but was ill-served by piecemeal forays into talk radio. Or maybe the audience was born suddenly by the shock of the Bush years. In any case, it is obvious that a sizeable liberal audience was not being served the red meat it craved. “People were hungry for strong, unapologetic liberals, and those were completely absent from the media landscape,” Moulitsas writes. “I mean, who did progressive [sic] have supposedly representing their side? Joe Frickin’ Klein. Is it any wonder blogs grew in response?”

Drum correctly notes that no liberal blogs get the level of readership that would sustain a national radio show, so Hertzberg and company were probably right. Then again, the top liberal blogs have a bigger audience than the top conservative blogs, and conservatives have managed to support several radio commentators. Still, Air America didn’t catch on, despite the considerable talents of Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo. I’d snark that FCC regulations prohibiting profanity was the cause, but myDD, especially, is generally very high-brow, verging on academic.

Drum thinks time may be the factor: “It took movement conservatives a couple of decades to build up their audience, and maybe it’ll take liberals that long too. Or maybe not. Olbermann is doing pretty well these days, isn’t he?” Indeed he is. Then again, it’s taken him a couple of decades to build up his audience. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, though, shot to stardom much more quickly–and without Olbermann’s vitriol. So, clearly, there are models.

Ross Douthat makes an interesting point:

I think Chait’s analysis of the “movement” quality of the netroots is spot-on, but he glides over what seems like a significant distinction between “movement” conservatism and netroots liberalism – namely, the extent to which the latter is tied less to any specific set of issues than to a hatred of the present Administration and all its works. I’m not saying that such passion isn’t a good catalyst for organizational and electoral success, but I’m less sure that it’s the kind of thing that sustains a movement in the long term, the way the conservative movement was sustained by a series of major policy goals – from reversing Roe v. Wade to shrinking the size of government to defeating Communism – over the course of its decades-long rise. The gang at National Review weren’t involved in political journalism just because they hated JFK and the liberal establishment; the ideas drove the politics, not the other way around.

Now, this is somewhat unfair, as the anger over the Iraq War is, I believe, quite genuine. Still, Douthat is right that much of the netroots is fueled by anti-Bush-Cheney rage. Will that survive into 2009, especially if a Democrat is elected president? Quite possibly not. Then again, liberals have been predicting that Rush Limbaugh would go away 1) after Clinton got elected and he couldn’t toady up to the administration anymore, 2) after Clinton was out of office and he couldn’t rant about his favorite punching bag anymore, 3) once Bush got elected and he couldn’t rail at an incumbent, and so forth. It may well be that the netroots, like the civil rights movement and women’s movement, will manage to sustain itself long after the initial motivating grievances were gone.