Jon Stewart rally brings 200,000 to the Mall

Will Jon Stewart run for President? Can he save America? The Comedy Central ham had already become the unlikely Walter Cronkite to his generation, with his 'fake news' satire The Daily Show, when he left the studio to mount a rally on the Washington Mall, where the rabble may gather at the epicenter of Western democracy.

Here, on Saturday, he sounded perhaps the only note of a tormented election season to meet with almost universal approval.

'Sanity Won Out in DC' went one headline after the sunny afternoon rally. At least 200,000 gathered before a stage labeled with Comedy Central banners rather than anything from Democrats, Republicans or Tea Partiers.

"Nobody stomped on anyone's head," commented another report, referring to recent reaction of Tea Party bouncers when confronted with a Democrat protestor. That's news.

The New York Times deemed the "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" a "political event like no other".

But the point is that it was as much political event as live political satire, just as The Daily Show has become a 'real' news broadcast to millions of viewers, mostly under 30, and the comedian their most trusted anchor.

Just last week, President Obama paid homage with a trip to Stewart's make-believe newsroom for an interview. The interview was the first for months to elicit something like the simple truth.

"You ran on very high rhetoric, hope and change, and the Democrats this year seem to be running on 'Please baby, one more chance'," suggested Stewart. Had the slogan "Yes We Can" become "Yes We Can… given certain conditions?"

Obama thought for a moment, and answered: "Yes, we can... But  it's not going to happen over night."

Stewart staged Saturday's rally with fellow satirist Stephen Colbert, less known in Britain, but a Tweedledee to Stewart's Tweedledum. Colbert began as an actor on The Daily Show, playing a network TV reporter in the field. But in 2005, he got his own show, in which he plays a raving-right-wing-loony talk show host, in the mould of Bill O'Reilly of Fox TV.

On the Mall stage, Stewart played the lefty and Colbert the furious righty as they dueled with jokes over kow-towing journalists and fear-mongering politicians, and they mock-fought in a duel of songs about trains. Neither endorsed a specific candidate, but everyone knows that The Daily Show is wrapped in a Democrat flag.

The rally was, in part, a response to the 'Rally to Restore Honor' staged by Glenn Beck, the latest shock-radio/Fox TV prophet to the Tea Party and radical right, by the Lincoln Memorial in August.

Beck and his cohorts at Fox relish their leadership roles. On the Mall, Stewart went further than ever before in acknowledging his. The news/entertainment crossover works for the left, too.

Stewart first became a hero to America's beleaguered liberals and mystified youth during the early Dubya Bush years of regime-change in Iraq.

Drowning in patriotism and fear in the wake of 9/11, the American news machine allowed itself to be led blinkered into the Bush world of half-truths and outright distortions, and has yet to recover from the disaster.

Millions turned to the BBC and the Guardian website, newly available, for a glimpse of reality, and, amazingly, to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Like Cronkite, the fabled CBS news anchor, Stewart seemed to tell the truth.

His cry on Saturday was, at least on the surface, bipartisan. He was calling for a halt to the fear-mongering and obfuscations of politics, and a return to 'sanity'.

He closed his rally with his only 'serious' lines: "We know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light we must work together. And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn't the promised land. Sometimes it's just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together."

Quite a few might prefer to go in the other direction - from New Jersey to the skyscrapers of Manhattan - but who better these days to lead Americans through the darkness of the Lincoln Tunnel than Jon Stewart? ·