Is This a Farcical Campaign?

A recent e-mail from an on-line news service said they were rejecting a press release we'd sent about the Jay Leno for President campaign. They said it was rejected because news about our campaign appeared "farcical." Well, if this is farce, welcome to the American political landscape!

Virtually everything that passes as modern presidential campaigning is farcical. Candidates raise and spend tens of millions of dollars to get their "serious messages" out to the American people. Their ridiculous, absurd, and incongruous blather is the same as the last campaign, and the campaign before that, and the campaign before that. The only thing that has changed is how the same dull messages have been repackaged and re-branded to sound like "caring positions" on "important issues."

At least Jay Leno has been brave and resourceful enough to see right through these candidates' thin veneers of seriousness to the funny and entertaining aspects of their true personalities. Night after night, Jay jokes and quips about Hillary, Barack, Rudy, and other challengers with scalpel-sharp wit and panache. He exposes the real farce within their campaign-induced rhetoric and, in the process, helps millions of Americans laugh about it.

What other presidential candidate has done so much for so many people? The very fact that we're even trying to draft Jay Leno to run for president in a donation-less campaign is proof that he's the one man who can cut through all of the crap to get to what's really important: Americans want to laugh and feel good. None of the other candidates can get people to laugh with them without having to laugh at them. Only Jay has successfully accomplished this feat. It's amazing we Americans haven't elected Jay Leno president before.

So, is our campaign to elect Jay Leno president farcical? Well, if by "farce" critics mean the "light and humorous treatment of serious matter by skillfully exploiting the situation rather than developing the character" [thanks, Webster], you could say it is farcical. In fact, given that definition, only this campaign and not the others should really be considered farcical.

Farcical is a label that we think Jay Leno will be proud and happy to bring with him into the Oval Office.