ou know what the presidential campaign needs? A little more outrage, that's what. In years past, the Republican National Convention was known to get the blood boiling in certain Cambridge ZIP codes. But with all that hand-holding and hugging going on this year, the only folks watching are the insomniacs - and maybe the saccharine manufacturers. It's hard to get riled up about dispassionate complacency, or whatever it's called.
Enter the Duke.
Now there's a candidate worth hating. He's a compassionate fascist who wants to make gun ownership mandatory. He proposes a fat tax on people who take up too much room. The budget surplus: He's all for it. Even his chief handler admits that the candidate is a shallow opportunist who would sell out for the highest price.
Get that man on the ballot.
Duke, of course, is the gonzo creation of ''Doonesbury'' cartoonist Garry Trudeau. The chain-smoking character has stepped off the comic pages to run for president with a high-tech, multimedia campaign. Of course, he has a Web site, www.duke2000.com. (''If you don't work that into your article in at least six places, you're as ungrateful as you are drop-dead gorgeous,'' the candidate says, speaking through Trudeau.)
Duke is brought to life by the latest animation and motion-capture technologies, which can add a bit of unpredictability to the mix. The campaign was launched in February at the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., where a 3-D version of Duke spoke to the audience in real time - until the computer crashed, that is. Duke, originally modeled after writer Hunter S. Thompson, has ingested a fair share of pharmaceuticals over the years, so it could have been an acid flashback.
So what brings Trudeau, who won a Pulitzer Prize for drawing ''little pictures of the Nixon White House,'' to the Internet? ''I'm not drawn for the usual reasons - greed and fear - because I'm neither poor nor scared about the future of my industry,'' he says in an e-mail interview. However, he notes that when he gave a talk at Stanford University earlier this year, some of the students had never read ''Doonesbury'' in a newspaper, but had seen it online. ''Although I personally love the little static black and white drawings I've spent my life sketching on rag paper (and can't foresee ever giving up), I am skeptical that a generation that's grown up experiencing the world through screens will support comics as I've known them.''
That same generation, though, has also grown up with instant ''top 10'' lists, frank discussions of presidential private parts, and dancing excretory products on ''South Park.'' How do you do satire in such an age? ''This question - how do you top reality? - has been asked for as long as I've been working. I heard it a lot during Watergate,'' says Trudeau, who contends that there are more satirists working today than ever before. Indeed, anyone who feels like it can produce parody on the Internet: Witness Zack Exley of Somerville, who was threatened by George W. Bush for his mock campaign site.
But certainly, most amateur satirists don't actually have the privilege of receiving such threats. It's hard to shock anyone these days. ''The main difference is that the taste bar has not only been lowered, but buried. Anybody can say anything,'' Trudeau says. ''I think `South Park' might have marked the end of all satiric restraint in mainstream popular culture. After all, if you're not going to be offended by a singing turd, then what's left? It's not political shenanigans that have become so extreme as to resist parody - it's the tools of parody that have reached their limit.''
And then there's Duke. He's always been what Trudeau describes as ''a towering symbol of ignorance and bigotry,'' more of a farcical figure than a satirical character. Trudeau insists the whole campaign is strictly for entertainment. ''I mean, obviously, we're trashing everything Duke stands for - his naked opportunism, his self-aggrandizement, his callousness and corruption. But it's not with any grandiose agenda in mind,'' says Trudeau. He doesn't want us to care one way or another about Duke: He just wants us to be entertained by him.
And you have to admit, that's what politics is all about these days, anyway. Duke works as a candidate precisely because his extremes are so entertaining. None of that bland, middle-of-the-road pandering for this guy. (On censorship: ''You have to remember that one person's porn site is another person's social life.'') None of that namby-pamby multiculturalism for this fellow. He's right out there with those recycled platitudes, promising to ''be the ferret in the pants of the government'' and ''to build a bridge back to the 20th century.'' And he even balanced out his ticket with the perfect prepackaged running mate: Kathie Lee.
If the Duke campaign proves anything (and Trudeau doesn't harbor any pretensions here), it's that a candidate these days can succeed only if he is a master of all media. His site (that's www.duke2000.com, OK?) features a weekly video, and this week's is a harangue about the Internet and personal privacy. It crashed my computer just as Duke got to the part about abolishing the census for women and minorities. As much as we love to hate this guy, his candidacy is doomed.
Back when Trudeau started drawing ''Doonesbury,'' college kids were united around issues like civil rights and the Vietnam War. What does the Net generation have? Napster. ''It hasn't escaped me that none of my three kids has purchased a CD since Christmas,'' he says. ''We're raising a nation of pirates. As a professional troublemaker, I'm pleased, of course. But as a content provider, I'm appalled. Either way, there's no turning back. We'd all better adapt.''
