Opinion: Stephen Colbert to grill Hillary Clinton tonight on truthiness

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, the presidential candidate whose truthfulness is questioned by many Americans, according to polling, will appear tonight on the Comedy Central show of Stephen Colbert, a performer known for truthiness and for his own attempted candidacies in both the Democratic and Republican party presidential primaries of South Carolina.

Colbert’s writers don’t have to look too hard for material. Between the 3 a.m. phone call, sniper fire in Bosnia and President Bill Clinton’s ability to repeatedly step on his wife’s campaign message, they’ve got plenty.

The question is why would Clinton submit herself to Colbert’s irony-laden, super-iconoclastic brand of humor? Is it perhaps her way to shout from the rooftops that she, indeed, has a sense of humor?

She’s already been on TV with David Letterman and Jay Leno and Ellen DeGeneres, et al. All the candidates like these friendly, casual formats where they can show a little of their personality, exhibit some powerful self-deprecation and crack a joke or two, even if the entire appearances have been carefully negotiated and roughly scripted.

And the fact the appearance comes less than one week before the crucial Pennsylvania Democratic primary and less than three weeks before the voting in Indiana and North Carolina.

Candidate spouses also do the shows. Michelle Obama was bantering with Colbert the other night after her husband declined to appear. And Cindy McCain will be on ‘The View’ next Monday.

It would seem, after all, Colbert’s viewers aren’t Clinton’s kind of voters. According to an article by Joshua Green in the Atlantic magazine last year, Colbert’s fans:

‘Tend to be young, white, educated, and male. Their median age is 37 and there’s a 60/40 male-female split. So far this year, he’s drawn a nightly audience that averages 1.3 million viewers nationwide, 874,000 of them in the 18-49 year-old demographic.’

But, hey, they can all vote. Whether the younger voters actually show up at the polls on election day, ah, that’s often been the problem for candidates who’ve counted on them.

-- Frank James

Frank James writes for the Swamp of the Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau.