A short time ago, I had a piece in American Thinker explaining why, once it became known what a fiction the story by Alex Haley was, I couldn't be made to watch Roots II.  Apparently I wasn't alone in feeling this way.  The expensive remake was number twenty for the week (see link to MediaLife ratings.)  Number one was a basketball game; number two was Game of Thrones.   

This was the first time I had ever looked up TV rankings, and it triggered a thought about the election in November: politicians are as stupidly mesmerized as the MSM about what gets sold to us as "popular" culture.  Because when we subtract the viewership of all twenty-five top shows from the general population, we find that maybe two hundred sixty million of us were doing something else besides watching TV.

For instance, pundits are forever exercising themselves over the small number of "independent voters" up for grabs, while at the same time the Audubon society tells us that forty-seven million Americans identify themselves as birdwatchers.

Wow!  If Trump or Frump could find a way to sweep even half of these into their camp, they'd run the table in all fifty states.  Indeed, given Audubon's number, it's a wonder that previous contenders haven't already been photographed in an Eddie Bauer windbreaker, binoculars hanging by a strap around their necks, red-cheeked, posed in wind-blown hair on a Massachusetts hillside during the autumn grackle migration.  Instead, candidates like Hillary Clinton put all the weight on being photographed with the likes of George Clooney at some Beverly Hills fundraiser. 

Imagine the irony if Trump were to win the election by pivoting in a debate and pointing a finger at Hillary: "Hillary Clinton supports so-called alternative energy resources like windmills and solar mirrors, which both chop thousands of eagles and hawks into bite-sized pieces and fry millions of songbirds to death.  Indeed, she's out to murder everything in feathers."

Even more astounding is that the American Library Association tells us that over two hundred million Americans have a library card, and even more than that visited their local library during the past year.  More yet that these numbers are growing even in the face of increasing internet use, including the estimated twenty million people who now use Kindles.

So here's an image of this popular culture the media and politicians ignore: pink flamingoes put out by children, which for some reason known only to earlier generations announce the coming of the annual Library Fair in my town.  An affair where thousands of donated used books are put out in tents for sale.  Everything from a hardbound edition of Gwyn Jones's History of the Vikings for a buck to a paperback Daphne du Maurier for twenty-five cents.  And as an attendee many times over, I can assure you that there is no parking within a quarter-mile of those tents, while inside them the tables get denuded of books quicker than Amazon piranhas take a tapir down to its bones.

But when's the last time you heard the two hundred million-plus library-goers – i.e., book readers – addressed in a presidential debate?  Some of them have to vote.  Couldn't Trump attack Hillary with her support of censorship (her desire to regulate talk radio, for "safe spaces" on college campuses, her association with left-wing goons breaking up talks) and suggest that she has libraries firmly in her sights?  That she wants to approve in advance their reading material?

I could go on with rodeo-goers, sport fishermen, casino gamblers, NASCAR attendees, do-it-yourselfers, and so on.  All avocations delivering many, many times the number of Americans who follow the Rolling Stones around (if people are still doing that).  These bird-lovers, readers, et al. represent our popular culture and are at the same time are almost completely ignored by so-called savvy inside-the-Beltway political strategists.  Virtually every one of these pursuits can be turned to a political advantage – sometimes a big political advantage.

I can see why Democrats ignore them, because by and large these people are doing their best to stay happy and positive in their lives, and the grist for the Democrats' mill is unhappy people or people who can be easily convinced they should be unhappy with America in some respect.  But why are Republicans giving this culture a pass?   I suppose because so many of them are inside-the-Beltway-minded themselves. 

But at the same time, doesn't this fact account for Trump's appeal?  An attraction that talking heads invariably, and very weakly, explain as disenchantment with the establishment without troubling themselves to examine the phenomena in depth?

After all, who inside the Beltway, in Marin County, or on the Upper East Side of Manhattan wants to admit that forty-plus million bird-watchers are pretty damn important in a democracy?  Maybe even more important than they are.  Or who'd do nothing but smirk at the pink flamingoes my town's children put out for their library each year in order to celebrate their reading and the reading of their parents, grandparents and neighbors?

Take it away, Donald.

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD.  See it Here.  He lives and writes in the colonial-era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York; blogs here; and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.com.