At war with the Colbert Nation

The South Carolina Democratic Party is going to live to regret snubbing Stephen Colbert, and not because he was ever a serious candidate.

On the one hand, Colbert has made his career on burning people dumb enough to take him seriously, so you can't really blame the S.C. Dems for being leery. I imagine they'd look pretty stupid if he won S.C., the only state he was trying to run in, only to find that he was kidding the whole time. Which he almost certainly was.

On the other, though, how can they bar anybody from the primary ballot when the thing already reads like the program for a three-ring circus? How can a rational person claim that Colbert was any less serious a candidate than Mike Gravel, whose entire campaign is based on viral video? And don't even get me started on Alan Keyes, who against all odds continues to be an actual black Republican presidential candidate. Yeah, that's gonna happen.

Colbert, allegedly the jester of the piece, was polling in the top three candidates last week, within just a few days of announcing his intentions. In many polls, he was beating my pick, John Edwards, who is about as "real" as they come. Even Editor and Publisher, a journalism trade publication that is usually allergic to jokes, mused that, if recent trends held, mused that Colbert would be the frontrunner before Thanksgiving. I'll the first one to admit that that sounds unlikely, but I'd also point out that it hardly sounds like a guy who should be ignored.

I mean, it's a primary. How much damage could he possibly do? It's not like he's going to go to Washington, talk big for a few months and then grab his ankles as soon as George Bush questions his patriotism. I think Harry Reid's pretty much got that job covered, anyway.

Worst of all, it makes the Democrats look just as tone-deaf as the neocons. They should have just let Colbert do his thing and then bow out. Get the kids interested in politics for once. Instead, they recoiled in horror at the merest shadow of a non-traditional campaign and drove stakes into its heart at the first opportunity, which is the very definition of conservatism.

They say the two parties are just different sides of the same coin, and it's moves like this that reinforce that belief. I want to believe that Clinton or Obama is going to ride into town on inauguration day and start hanging Halliburton employees, but we all know that's not going to happen. So the vote will split relatively evenly, as it always does, and the Dems seem happy to follow the same old playbook and drop another close one to the other side.

Colbert may be a joke now, but we'll see how funny the S.C. Dems think he is when Mitt Romney goosesteps into the Oval Office and starts bombarding at random.