Colbert for Cain

Herman Cain may have dropped out of the Presidential race weeks ago, but new ads are advocating a vote for him in South Carolina. These videos, including the one above, are being put out by the ‘Super PAC’ set up by satirist Stephen Colbert, the host of the Colbert Report famous for joking at George Bush's expense at the 2006 White House Correspondents' dinner.

Super PACs — organisations which can raise unlimited sums from corporations and other groups as well as individuals, but are prohibited from coordinating with candidates or political parties — became a feature of the US political landscape in 2010, after a Supreme Court ruling made them possible. This has lead to the bizarre spectacle of PACs spending huge sums putting out ads supporting their candidate and attacking his opponents, while the candidate himself denies all knowledge. It's not Newt Gingrich who put out ads attacking Romney on his investment career, for example, it's a pro-Gingrich Super PAC called ‘Winning Our Future’.

So Colbert set up his own Super PAC — ‘Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow’ — to lampoon this phenomenon. And he didn't stop there. Buoyed by a poll that put him on 5 per cent in the South Carolina Republican primary, he decided to set up an exploratory committee to consider a bid for president of ‘the United States of South Carolina’. This gives him an even better opportunity to mock the rules prohibiting PACs from coordinating with candidates. He handed over control of the PAC to Jon Stewart — host of the Colbert Report's sister show The Daily Show — and it was renamed ‘The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC’. Stewart announced that ‘Stephen and I have in no way have worked out a series of morse-code blinks to convey information with each other on our respective shows’.

But Colbert can't get on the ballot for the South Carolina ballot, and there's no space for voters to write his name in. So, instead, he and his Super PAC are campaigning for the ‘one name on the ballot that stands for true Americanimity’: Herman Cain. Hence the video above, and this one narrated by Samuel L Jackson (‘Enough is enough! I have had it with these money-grubbing Super PACs messing with our Monday to Friday elections!’). And today, Colbert and Cain will jointly hold ‘The Rock Me Like a Herman Cain: South Cain-olina Primary Rally’. According to a Colbert press release:

‘Colbert said he wants “all undecided voters to vote for Cain,” adding, “9-9-9.”’