The return of real politics

Sam Smith - For some days lately I have tried to figure out why Kamala Harris and Tim Walz seemed so positively familiar and then I remembered how I got interested in politics in the first place. When I was 12 years old I had stuffed envelopes in a campaign that ended 69 years of Republican rule in Philadelphia. It was a new and happy experience to be sharing a small space with political activists compared to my parents' often stuffy friends and the relatives I  ran into at home.

I had met hardly any adult Jews, blacks or labor union officials in my neighborhood. They certainly didn't attend our church, but most of all I hadn't met many people with the sort of tough-talking enthusiasm one found in politics. These were people totally engaged not only in their campaigns but with life itself and it was this quality, rather than their ethnicity  that truly attracted me - so different as it was from the restrained, diffident manner of members of a subspecies that has been described as God's frozen people.

When I began my college years at Harvard, I soon found that working as a newsman for the student run radio station was far more exciting than endless classes, and that writing a few hundred word newscast was more fun than a required 1500 word essay. I also began covering the Cambridge city council whose  members were much easier to talk to than one of my professors.  The mayor, whom I had stumbled upon in Harvard Square, once even bought me a cup of coffee in a local café. 

My first real job was with a DC radio station and, as one of a dozen or so reporters in the city who then had a battery operated tape recorder, I was covering everything from White House news conferences to fires and murders. But in the years that followed, I began to learn that the politics I had experienced as a kid was fading on me.

I was reminded of this the other day when an old friend recalled a gathering at a house where the band I led was playing and I had complained about the crowd spending more time on issues than on music. Politics had become a matter of policy far more than a real relationship between the elected and those who elected them.

There were a few exceptions such as Senator Eugene McCarthy, for whom a buddy had served as his campaign manager in his failed presidential bid. We would have occasional lunch at the Progressive Review conference room at La Tomate Restaurant - AKA the table just southwest of the bar.

Gene believed that the Senate was like a herd of cattle while the House acted more like hogs. The former would willingly follow one steer with a sense of direction but the latter needed to be stampeded.

Gene and I both owned property in Rappahannock County, Virginia, about two hours away. If DC had the population density of Rappahannock, it would have had only 2,000 people living in it. I once went entered the H&J Grocery store and found a group of men drinking coffee, including a fully uniformed and armed game warden holding his coffee in one hand and a copy of Foreign Affairs in the other. It was explained to me that Gene McCarthy had been in earlier.

Challenged to explain who did live in Rappahanock County, he once responded: "I acknowledged that there were one or two gentlemen in the county and went on to explain that the men of my acquaintance in the county were country lawyers, well diggers, preachers, horse trainers and traders, orchard men, cattle breeders and horse breeders, wood cutters, timber men, a game warden, at least three country store owners, an auctioneer, two filling station operators, the keeper of the hounds, a real estate man who encouraged people to eat rutabagas, a county supervisor, one or two persons suspected of being moonshiners and bootleggers, poachers, a coon hound trainer and hunter, and one suspected of keeping fighting chickens, and a few scattered United Airlines pilots." 

But on the whole politics had become less fun and more just another bureaucratic, institutional enterprise in which personality mattered less and less.

That’s what so fascinated and charmed me about the current campaign. Harris and Walz are real people for whom their ability at human connections matches their ability to deal with issues and we don’t have to give up the former to make the latter sound good. 

It's nice to have real politics back.