The Other Nine-Tenths

Afterwards I chatted with the guy. He was quite smart and interesting. He told me he’d won several sales prizes at Radio Shack. I wasn’t surprised. Then he asked what I was doing in Monroe. Covering the Gary Hart campaign, I said. “Who?” he asked. “Gary Hart,” I repeated. “I’ve never heard of him,” he said. He was utterly unaware a national political campaign was going on, and he wasn’t embarrassed about it.

I’ve often recalled this story because it touches on one of the great divides in America. Yes, there are two Americas you’ve probably never thought about, but I have. There’s one America that’s involved in politics or at least keeps up with what’s going on politically or in public policy. And there’s another America that couldn’t care less about politics. As you might guess, I’m part of the political community, the journalism wing.

The conceit of the political crowd, which I estimate at 10 million to 15 million Americans, is that all those other Americans are benighted. The politics people believe their jobs are extraordinarily important because they deal with significant, even global, matters night and day, while the rest of the country consists of silly, apathetic people who should be paying serious attention to what their betters in Washington and a few other places tell them. That they aren’t hanging on every word coming from the politics crowd only proves how frivolous they are. What’s worse, the non-politics types make up a whopping majority of the electorate. There are perhaps 85 million to 95 million of them. They decide all elections.

Now here’s my fear. Eddie Murphy touched on it in a famous skit on “Saturday Night Live” years ago about the secret life of white people. Murphy put on whiteface to find out what button-down whites do when blacks aren’t around. It turns out whites have a wild time, cavorting, drinking, and partying, partying, partying. Thus my fear is all those millions of people who are oblivious to politics most of the time have wonderful, satisfying lives and have much more fun than political obsessives do. Maybe there’s an inverse relationship: The more you’re caught up in politics, the less thrilling your real life is.

To start with, the apolitical aren’t so ignorant after all when it comes to voting. A political scientist, Sam Popkin, figured out that most voters, though they give barely a glance at campaigns and politics, have just enough information to make rational decisions in the voting booth. So the country isn’t suffering because of their lackadaisical attitude toward the important things.

And look how different their lives are, and pleasurably so, from those of politics people. They don’t have to watch TV on Sunday morning to see who said what in response to a question on the future of no-fault insurance or revisions of the Clean Air Act. They can go to church, sleep in, play golf, lollygag.

They don’t have to read the entire front section of a newspaper every day, especially the op-ed page. They’re spared the burden of ever tuning in to C-SPAN. They get to watch popular television shows other than “The West Wing.” They go to movies of no cultural, social, or political importance whatsoever. They’ve never heard of that documentary about George W. Bush produced by Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, and they wouldn’t watch it if they had. Their brains aren’t focused on who’s going to run, who’s going to win.

Their social life is rich–parties, tailgating, picnics, drop-bys. This is quite different from the social life in Washington, which consists in large part of attending think tank banquets, book parties, two-day conferences on tort reform, or dinners at which a cabinet member is the prized guest.

Of course the folks in the hinterland don’t experience the upside of life in politics, the supposedly ego-satisfying side. For instance, no one sees their face on TV or their byline in some prestige publication. They don’t get recognized in airports by total strangers.

I know. Being on yip-yap shows on TV means you get recognized from time to time. But rarely does anyone remember anything you ever said, which is telling in ways I’d rather not think about. Just the other day, a woman confronted me at O’Hare Airport and asked if I were the guy who folds his arms on the Fox News Channel (she offered her imitation). Sad but true, the answer was yes. But I’m more often stopped by people with another question: “Say, aren’t you Mort Kondracke?”

–Fred Barnes