STEPHEN Colbert said yesterday that his cam paign for president was no joke – and that could be a problem.
“I don’t want to be president. I want to run for president. There’s a difference,” the host of “The Colbert Report” said on an unusual appearance on “Meet the Press.”
But late last week, concerns began to surface that – if Colbert gets on the ballot in next year’s presidential primary in South Carolina as he plans – he’ll have to grapple with some unfunny legal issues.
Federal election laws bar corporate campaign contributions.
And if someone wants to make a stink about it, according to some election law experts, a case could be made that Comedy Central – which is owned by Viacom – gave Colbert a half-hour every night last week to promote his campaign.
“You don’t get a different set of rules because you’re running as a joke,” Marc Elias, a top Washington election lawyer, told the Web site Politico.com.
“This has probably been done in jest,” South Carolina GOP chairman Katon Dawson told the site. “But running for president is not something that you can really have a lot of fun with, because of the federal election laws that are involved.”
Yesterday it was hard to take Colbert too seriously.
He even said he’d consider Republican Sen. Larry Craig – who has been caught up in an airport men’s room sex scandal – as his running mate.