Comedy Central icon Stephen Colbert’s (“The Colbert Report”) latest attempt at campaign hi-jinks involved encouraging Iowans to write in a false name during the weekend’s presidential straw poll, but one television station in Des Moines wasn’t playing ball.
Colbert, who formed a “super PAC” this year and won approval from the FEC to begin taking contributions, is encouraging Iowans to vote for “Rick Parry” during Saturday’s test vote for Republican presidential candidates.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, with an “e,” signaled an intention to join the GOP presidential list last week but was not on the straw poll ballot. Voters are able to write in candidates, however.
Colbert produced two spots through his PAC, laden with images of corn and farms, asking for the “Parry” vote. “That’s ‘Parry’ with an ‘a’ for America, an ‘a’ for Iowa,” one ad says.
On his show last week he encouraged the misspelled vote “because there’s no ‘e’ in ‘team.'”
Colbert bought commercial time to run his ads on the NBC and CBS affiliates in Des Moines. But the ABC affiliate, WOI-DT, rejected the ads. In an email sent to Colbert, the station said the ads would confuse voters.
“The Midwestern media elite are trying to silence us,” Colbert said. “They don’t want your voice to be heard, folks. The fat cats in Des Moines think they can sit in their ivory corn silos and play puppet-master with our national politics.”
