20 Hours in America

This past week, I lived out a personal version of two of my favorite episodes of The West Wing.

Season four of the show opens on a campaign stop at a small grain farm in Indiana. Rows of corn and fields of soybeans roll away in the background while President Bartlet works to inspire local voters. But while he delivers rhetoric, two of his top staffers are having a side meeting with the host farmer.

Despite the idyllic setting, the main plot of the episode quickly unfolds as those same senior staffers literally miss the motorcade. They’re left behind, with limited cell phone coverage, and no direct way home. They bum rides with locals, burn time at convenience stores and local restaurants, and even have a run in with a quirky local time zone that doesn’t recognize daylight savings time (or maybe the other way around).

My own 20 hours in America played out this past Sunday. I was just wrapping a 5 day conference with grain producers from across the country. And while I didn’t miss the motorcade, I was one of the many unlucky travelers trying to get out of New Orleans amidst an incredible amount of flight cancellations – all on the same day we were recovering from the “spring ahead” into daylight savings. Our team endured our own trek across the country by plane and rental car, spending just about twenty hours “away from the world” ourselves.

But where ours was just a tangle of first world problems, the characters of The West Wing spent their own twenty hours learning a hard lesson. One that can be helpful to aspiring advocates – and political professionals – everywhere: open your eyes and see what’s around you.

You see, those same staffers – and many they interacted with throughout the drama of their travels – wrote off their surroundings and the people living in them. From the beginning of the first episode, the staffers had lived under an assumption that the voters in Indiana were already a lock for their opponent, ignoring their stories until called out by a junior staffer for their shortsightedness. Conversely, the locals repeatedly dismissed them simply because of their employer.

Late in the story line – after being called out by an assistant – we find our senior staffers making their way to a bar. A bar with a lone father, wrestling with the reality of his daughter’s first college visit. Because they finally weren’t talking politics, the staffers hear his story and come to understand just a little bit of the barriers facing him. They come to understand that, like many others, he could benefit from a change in policy that just makes it a little bit easier to send his kid to college.

It’s a great moment and a better lesson for us all. When we are able to make room for the real people, and their stories, our politics become a little more human. We come to understand that a compelling story can make a greater impact than any polls, pundits or policy wonks already in the mix.

The story of these episodes is just that. We can overthink a lot in politics. We can be caught up in the gamesmanship. At the end of the day, our politics must put people first. We are at our very best when we don’t write each other off. We are at our very best when we make room for their stories. We are at our very best when we open our eyes to what’s happening in the lives of others.