Stephen Colbert’s SuperPAC Stunt Inspires Wacky Array Of Undergrad-Run Super PACs

It appears that Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow– the Super PAC run by comedian Stephen Colbert— has prompted something of a Super PAC Spring in college towns, in which appear to be registered dozens of ridiculous but Federal Election Commission-approved groups capable of receiving unlimited corporate donations. From Why Not ZoidPAC? to Cats for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, CNN took a look at the undergrads who took Colbert’s call for more political involvement to its logical extreme.

RELATED: Poll: 69% Of Americans Want Super PACs Outlawed

“I was just sitting in my dorm room one night and said ‘oh hell, why not?’,” Grand Poobah of the Why Not ZoidPAC and MIT freshman Danny Ben-David told CNN, explaining that he spent all of 44 cents on establishing his Super PAC. The Super PAC is, in fact, real, and has its own snazzy Open Secrets page. He wasn’t alone in that line of thinking, as the article quotes two other heads of Super PACs with the same thinking. Cats for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow– also a real enough Super PAC apparently specializing in the promotion of LOLCat memes in politics, or something– is a creation of professional basketball player David Jensen, who has a clear vision of the future for the organization:

Jensen created Cats For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and already has a website and Twitter account set up. At last count, the website featured no fewer than 28 cat photos.

Jensen has a few unique ideas that he hopes will attract donors. One is to put a donor’s name on a baseball card with a cat-related pun.

“The top donors would be fat cats,” Jensen said. “And if you weren’t donating a lot of money, you would be a skinny cat. I’d have all these kinds of cats.”

The extent to which Colbert has inspired this sort of ironic factionalism is yet unknown– after all, the elections aren’t exactly over– but the fact that the biggest names surfacing in the aftermath of Citizens United include intentionally hilarious groups like Cats for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow and unintentionally hilarious donors like Foster Friess flies in the face of the conventional media wisdom that Super PACs would spell the end of American democracy. At the very least, they seem to have spawned a new generation of political satirists armed with merely existent bank accounts and Open Secrets pages.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.