During his own media moment, which peaked around the 2004 election, Stewart reliably sidestepped the question of his influence, and he’s always remained studiously nonpartisan, even though his personal politics aren’t hard to discern. The politics of Colbert, the person, are more difficult to unravel — “I’m not a political person, and I certainly don’t have the answers,” is his refrain — but Colbert, the character, now commands the power of his growing “Colbert Nation” in a manner The Daily Show has never attempted with its fans. In recent months, Colbert has dispatched his followers on a rampage of merry mischief: bombing the Website of a junior-league hockey team holding a name-our-mascot campaign (the team’s mascot is now Steagle Colbeagle the Eagle); hijacking an online poll posted by Hungary’s Economic Ministry to name a new bridge over the Danube the Stephen Colbert Bridge (he topped the poll, but Hungary disqualified him because he’s not dead); sabotaging Wikipedia, the collectively edited online encyclopedia, after Colbert coined “Wikiality,” a reality that exists simply because enough people agree on it. These are all pranks, of course, but they would have fallen flat if there wasn’t a real Colbert Nation waiting to be mobilized. Ironically —a nd not really in the Col-Bear ironic way—he’s become something very close to what he’s parodying, a kind of Bill O’Reilly for the angry left. “The funny thing is, I knew when we were developing this show, we were doing a show that parodies the cult of personality,” he says. “And yet, if the show was successful, it would generate a cult of personality. It had to. That means it’s working.”
Here's a question that I've pondered before -- it strikes me that the Col-Bear character can only thrive so long as Republicans are in power. What happens to Col-Bear and his bag of recurring hijinks on January 20, 2009?
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