So I’m quoted in the Yeas and Nays column of today’s Washington Examiner, commenting on the blogospheric reaction to Stephen Colbert’s presidential campaign announcement… or should I say “campaign” announcement. Here was my takeaway:
“Blogs are attracted to shiny objects, and Colbert is nothing if not a shiny object,” Beutler said. “Even serious-minded bloggers can’t resist.”
I wish I had said “bloggers are attracted,” considering that blogs themselves are inanimate objects (heck, they’re not even objects) and incapable of being attracted to things without the help of a blogger… but I think the point gets across. Meantime, kudos to Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin for running my specific numbers:
[A]fter Colbert announced Oct. 16, he was mentioned on 0.09 percent of all blog posts (not just political blogs). Hillary Clinton had the same level of mentions during the same period, and Rudy Giuliani was mentioned on 0.08 percent of blogs. In terms of raw numbers, Beutler said, “In the three-day period surrounding his announcement (day of, morning after, and one more day) 748 different blog posts mentioned the phrases ‘Stephen Colbert’ and ‘president.’ If you run the same search for ‘Hillary Clinton’ without ‘president’ — since we assume any post about her is also about her candidacy — we get 727 posts. [So] even though our search string for Hillary was less stringent he actually scored more mentions than she did.”
The figures above are probably more in-depth than the average reader of gossip columns can handle, but then again this is Washington, where even the gossip is a bit wonkish (Drew Carey visits Reason Magazine!).
But for the purposes of Blog P.I., it’s not quite enough. The numbers above actually come from two different sources — the percentages come from the Icerocket Trend Tool and the raw numbers from Google Blogsearch — so no mathematical formula should feature both numbers. Keeping in mind that all of these tools are flawed, it’s my belief that when they show the same pattern, you’re onto something. And this is it:
Here are the Google figures for Colbert, Hillary and Rudy. And the figures for comparing Colbert’s announcement to the (more) legitimate candidates come from this February post.
I think that takes care of everything. What does this say about Colbert? Certainly, he is as relevant — and his satire as cutting — as when his late-night show spun off from Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” nearly two years ago. That’s pretty impressive, considering the essential gimmickiness of the program.
But will he remain as relevant past 2008, with President Bush out of office? That is, of course, assuming he doesn’t follow President Bush into office.
P.S. Not just the Facebook group that’s more popular than the Obama one that inspired it, but Stephen Colbert has more support (at least according to Rasmussen’s robots) than Ron Paul? Is Colbert Nation really fiercer than the “Google Ron Paul” set? I have my doubts, but the poll is amusing.
(FWIW: I’m with Fred.)
I trust the readers will readily realize that all those numbers and response percentages mean absolutely nothing. We all know there are multitudes of sites in the blogosphere that make comment on any thing only to see their rating numbers increase. A good example of that is when a negative comment is posted about candidate Ron Paul, his followers, who all must be netheads, jump all over it.
A poster who is truly interetsed in the political battlefront would ignore Colbert completely as they did in past years with Pat Paulson and/or Chicago’s own “America First Lar Daly”.or look at it as a brief respite from the daily political gring if anything at all.
I believe that Colbert’s relevance will disappear when his material is no longer of interest just the same as all the other has been funny men/women!