Out of touch: Most politicians, media don’t understand ‘the real world’

By David McElroy · March 28, 2012

Where did you stand on the great Etch-a-Sketch controversy last week? Were you with Team Romney, which started the controversy with an ill-designed metaphor? Or were you with Team Santorum or Team Gingrich, which went on the attack by putting Etch-a-Sketch toys into the hands of their candidates to wave around on stage?

Or were you like the media and the pundits? Were you so busy gorging yourself on various forms of the Etch-a-Sketch metaphor — from every angle — that you pounced on any morsel that might sound like a new perspective on the goofy line?

Or were you more like me? I was vaguely aware of a very stupid controversy, but I pretty much ignored it — because it meant absolutely nothing.

The Etch-a-Sketch story is the latest example of something I’ve seen for more than 20 years. When you’re inside politics, you can tend to assume — without ever consciously deciding to — that people outside the political bubble care just as much as you do about the trivia inside that bubble. I was reminded of that Tuesday because of a short story in the Washington Post. A reporter from the Post seemed surprised that a poll shows that 55 percent of people never even heard of the whole Etch-a-Sketch silliness last week.

My experience is that most people inside of politics honestly think that the things they’re talking about are on the minds and lips of intelligent people everywhere. They believe that what they do is so Important — with a capital I — that everyone must know and care about it. It’s not a conscious thing. It’s just an attitude that you pick up among them. They believe — on some level — that people care about the subtleties of the political arguments they’re in the middle of with their opponents. The idea that most people don’t even care about a tempest in a teapot such as the Etch-a-Sketch episode would suggest that maybe what they spend all day doing isn’t as important as what they believe — and they can’t handle that.

The more people are inside the political cocoon — addicted to the high of fighting those political fights and following the “industry” like a sports junkie — the more likely they are to believe that solutions in life come from politics. The more people who believe that, the less likely they are to leave others alone to live real life instead.

We’ve tried all sorts of things to make politics more reasonable and responsive to real people. We’ve tried all sorts of campaign finance reform since 1974. We’ve tried term limits. We’ve tried third parties and independent movements of various kinds. But nothing seems to change. So I have a simple suggestion.

I propose that we establish a mentor program for politicians and political reporters. We could have volunteers from real life — the kinds of people who wouldn’t bother paying attention to Etch-a-Sketch silliness — who would be paired with politicians and political reporters. It would be sort of like a Big Brother program or a business mentoring program, but the people from real life would teach the people from inside the political bubble about real life instead of how to stay away from crime and drugs. (Well, maybe that, too, but that’s another issue.)

The politicos could spend a week being “embedded” in real life with their mentors. They could go to work with them and to church and Little League practice and the grocery store. They could listen to the mentor and his friends talk about real life and the things that matter to them. Maybe they could learn a few things to carry back with them.

Maybe it wouldn’t work. Maybe it wouldn’t make any difference. But there’s a chance — a small one — that the next time a political advisor sat in a strategy session and someone proposed having the candidate wave an Etch-a-Sketch on stage, maybe somebody at the table would have the guts to laugh and say, “You know what? Real people don’t care about this.” Maybe a reporter would have the guts to point out that the controversy at hand was a manufactured thing that didn’t make a lick of difference to real people. Maybe.

It’s just a fantasy, but I can dream, can’t I? I have the plan all diagrammed right here. Want to see it? It’s on my Etch-a-Sketch.

Note: I should point out that Ron Paul was the only one of Romney’s opponents to take an approach to Etch-a-Sketch-gate in line with what I’d prefer. Not that it will make any difference for him, of course.

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Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

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