Election Coverage, and the 'Real' Issue

My name is James, and I am a former Real American. I grew up in Monroe, Mich. (pop. 22,076), just across the state line from Holland, Ohio, where lives Joe Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. Joe the Plumber, campaign 2008's latest shorthand for Real America. My dad--also named Joe--drove a beer and wine delivery truck and hunted deer. We went ice fishing and bowling. The first album I ever bought was Bob Seger's Live Bullet.

Today my core beliefs are pretty much the same as then. (Well, the Bob Seger ... only in moderation.) But now I am unreal because I work in the media and live in Brooklyn, which is presumably not among Sarah Palin's "pro-American" parts of America. This is what campaign coverage tells me. If a candidate appeals to my kind, it is a liability. My artificiality will stain him with a mark that can be washed off only by a shot, a beer and a pilgrimage to Scranton, Pa.

I sometimes wonder where my realness went. Did it fall out somewhere on I-80 when I moved to New York? Does it wear off, like a layer of skin? Did I ever have it? Or is it just a useful myth?

The "useful" part, at least, is confirmed by John McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer's argument that her candidate would win in "real Virginia," as opposed to the D.C. suburbs. And it certainly had something to do with why McCain and Barack Obama mentioned Joe the Plumber in the final presidential debate more than 20 times and why McCain praised him on the stump as though he were Ronald Reagan.

Wurzelbacher, who had questioned Obama on his tax policy, quickly ran into revelations that he'd probably get a tax cut under Obama, that he owed back taxes and that his first name was actually Samuel. But you can see why he made such an attractive campaign mascot. Joe the Software Consultant or Joe the Staples Manager would not tick off nearly as many populist boxes as Joe the Plumber: beefy, hails from the heartland, works with his hands. The kind of guy Chris Matthews, Bill O'Reilly and Joe Scarborough lionize as "regular" and "real." If you can't convince Joe, then you, sir, are an élitist wuss.

Politicians have been calling their voters the salt of the earth--and delegitimizing the other guy's--since Richard Nixon's Silent Majority and before. But now they're abetted by a political press that dotes on a nostalgic definition of realness that bears ever less relation to today's America.

It's the Deadliest Catch--ification of politics. The more the electorate becomes suburban and diverse, the more pundits romanticize a definition of "working people"--like Discovery's Alaskan-crab fishermen--that is largely small town or rural, traditionally blue collar and white. The press spends months at the outset of each election at the independent diners and pancake breakfasts of Iowa and New Hampshire, a kind of museum-preserved Americana. Yet in 2000, according to U.S. Census data, only 59 million Americans lived in rural areas, and 30 million lived in small towns of fewer than 50,000 residents, compared with 192 million in cities and suburbs. Most of us, it seems, are unreal.