Fed up with Washington politicians and the status quo, voters in this grim election season turned to nontraditional voices on the National Mall to make sense of their anger and disillusionment.
It may be hard to imagine anything less politically subversive than a rally organized around television celebrities, but if this political year has a cultural theme, it has been about upending old stereotypes.
In back-to-back events on the Mall this year — from Fox News personality Glenn Beck’s Tea Party-infused Rally to Restore Honor in August to the One Nation Working Together rally organized by labor unions and progressive groups in October — partisans rejected partisanship, renounced politics while embracing politicians, and reviled the media while celebrating media celebrities.
“I think it’s really emblematic of the frustration and discontent that people have with the current political system,” said Lauren Feldman, an assistant professor of communications at American University.
Saturday’s Rally to Restore Sanity and the satirical March to Keep Fear Alive were headlined by Comedy Central celebrities Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who in their quest to skewer today’s politics of rage gave voice to the disenchantment on both sides and helped promote politics as relevant to an electorate that feels so distant from those they elected.
Stewart’s event, in particular, drew an enthusiastic suitor in President Obama, who endorsed the rally early then appeared last week on Stewart’s “Daily Show.”
As the Stewart/Colbert events approached, critics dismissed the rallies as a joke, as politics for people who don’t care about politics and as a corporate stunt to gin up book sales and ad rates.
Feldman, who has researched the link between late night comedy and political participation, begged to differ. Her research found that during the 2004 campaign, viewers of Stewart’s show and the satirical “Colbert Report” were interested and engaged in the election.
“One of the chief criticisms of this weekend’s events is that they risk undermining politics and making a farce of political rallies,” Feldman said. “But we know that people who watch these shows are more interested and knowledgeable.”
In promoting the rally, Stewart denied his event was a rejoinder to Beck’s. He also said it was not political — a strange claim to make after hosting the president and gathering thousands in Washington three days before a critical election.
“The march is like everything that we do,” Stewart told New York magazine, ” just a construct … to translate the type of material that Stephen and I do.”
