He’s calling it the Million Moderate March. Arch-liberal news satirist Jon Stewart is planning a “Rally to Restore Sanity” in Washington next month to draw voters to an anti-extremism demonstration sold on witty irony.
His tongue may be in his cheek, but it doesn’t muffle the star TV host’s rallying cry to an exasperated mainstream just days before the mid-term elections in November.
Sent up as “a few hours of fun,” but in reality a serious riposte to the right-wing Tea Party movement now stealing the spotlight, Stewart promised to supply signs declaring “I Disagree With You, But I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Hitler” and other deadpan slogans.
PHOTO: AFP
The day after he announced the rally on his political satire program, The Daily Show, mainstream news channels were calling the Washington police to check it wasn’t a hoax.
They were told Stewart had, indeed, applied for permits for a public gathering on Oct. 30.
It will take place on the National Mall below the Lincoln Memorial, site of so many historic demonstrations over the decades. Not least of which was the recent “Restoring Honor” rally organized by Stewart’s antithesis, the right-wing conservative Christian TV host Glenn Beck. The “Million Moderate” reference is also a poke at Beck’s predominantly white rally, which talked of “reclaiming” civil rights on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, and in the place also where African Americans held their Million Man March for stronger rights in 1995.
Stewart’s event is designed to counter what he called a minority of 15 percent or 20 percent of the country that has dominated the national political discussion with extreme rhetoric.
News of Stewart’s rally came at the end of an extraordinary week. It began with a narrowly avoided Koran-burning on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and ended with former Alaska governor and right-wing darling Sarah Palin stoking suspicions that she will run for the White House in 2012.
In the middle came the giant Tea Party upset, where inexperienced but blowhard conservatives — opposed by their own official Republican party — won primary elections and will now fight for Congressional seats in the mid-terms.
They will not succeed if Stewart has his way. He is even appearing on The O’Reilly Factor, the Fox News show of another of his bellowing right-wing rivals, Bill O’Reilly, on Wednesday.
The last time Stewart went on Fox, he managed to broadcast more criticism of the channel on the actual channel than anyone could remember, accusing it of being a “cyclonic perpetual emotion machine” that has “taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy, and turned it into a full-fledged panic about the next coming of Chairman Mao.”
Stewart is a master of comedy, but he is also seriously influential. When he blasted CNN’s dog-pit-style political pundit-fight Crossfire program back in 2004, saying it was “hurting America” with its mindless, partisan bickering, the show was eventually canceled, with Stewart’s criticism cited as one of the reasons.
The largest segment of Stewart’s audience is under 30 and has liberal views — and gets as much of its news from The Daily Show as from the evening news programs and cable news channels.
Stewart’s rally will be counter-balanced by a spoof “extremist conservative” rally called the “March to Keep Fear Alive” by his fellow Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert.
It may not be enough to help US President Barack Obama retain control over the House of Representatives in Congress, however. The Republicans are firm favorites to wrest the majority from the Democrats.
However, Republican hopes to win control of the upper house, the Senate, too, took a significant step back after the success of fringe right-wing candidates in the primary elections last week.
The victory of evangelical right-winger Christine O’Donnell in the Delaware primary spurred analysts to predict that the Democratic candidate would now beat the original odds and win that Senate seat comfortably in November. O’Donnell is now 11 points behind in the polls in that state, whereas Mike Castle, the moderate Republican she beat on Tuesday last week, had been strongly ahead.
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