SOMEWHERE ON A STREET NEAR YOU, one or both of our major political parties will soon have a ward committee meeting. Ward committee members are the people in your community who think an ideal weekend is spent stuffing envelopes or manning a phone bank on behalf of their pet cause. They are noble people; they are also a little strange.
The people who make up ward committees are passionate about politics. Really, really passionate. It is the parties’ good fortune that their ward committee meetings are held in private living rooms across the country and not televised on C-SPAN. Indeed, for the vast majority of Americans who maintain a benign indifference to politics, watching their fellow citizens angrily rant for 90 minutes on the sorry state of the nation before finally repairing for coffee and cookies would be depressing and frightening.
