Bringing Power to the People Who Care About Politics

You look around at the people in the big hotel meeting room--and it’s a nice room, with Danish and coffee laid out at the back, and microphones and video screens set up in front--and you figure one of two really, really serious things is going to happen here:

Either someone like action star Casper Van Dien is going to kick down the door and spray the room with an atomic flame-thrower, shouting, “Die, you scum!”

Or everyone in here is going to wind up running the country.

Which is better? You’re the American voter--you decide. But before you choose option A and turn the dial to “scorch,” read on.

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More than 100 people signed up for this one-day campaign training seminar in Los Angeles, the last of three across the nation’s time zones, from Washington, where the seminaristas were young, Ivy-ish overachievers, to Chicago, where they were likely to be coglets in the perpetual motions of Democratic machine politics.

Here in L.A., Republicans outnumbered Democrats, and most of them were not long out of school, working on farm teams at policy or nonprofit jobs, and peering over the fence longingly into the land of the political majors.

It wasn’t boot camp for some tattooed fringe-fest in the Idaho panhandle, but because Americans regard politics as an almost equally unseemly pursuit, the people in this room were certainly not normal.

Dan Schnur is co-director of the seminar. You may have heard of him--a postgraduate spinmeister in Pete Wilson’s office and a Republican strategist at the front of the Rolodex. He told the group more than once that “you are not normal because you care” about the substance and the mechanics of politics.

When Schnur said his ideal

TV schedule would be “Inside Politics” for 23 hours a day, with one hour for “The West Wing,” they loved it--loved what would be most Americans’ idea of torture.

That’s how deep the gulf is. The seminar’s higher purpose was, as Schnur said, “to make people care more and make more people care” about politics. “Care” is an Olympian standard when barely a third of people even registered to vote bother to.

Like the tread-depth on my tires, politics is something to be ignored until it’s a problem, by which time it’s probably too late. The archetypal, awful American voter was a prospective juror in Oliver North’s trial in the Iran-Contra scandal. In the most egregious political scandal since Watergate--and don’t bother e-mailing me about Monica-gate--this woman found the news “depressing” and Iran-Contra in particular “boring,” and if her mother even mentioned anything about the news, “I always tell her to get out of my room, I don’t want to hear it.”

E.J. Dionne’s classic book

“Why Americans Hate Politics”--which should be the homework for this seminar--answers its own question: because politics isn’t about voters; it’s about politicians.

If voters don’t see anything they want on the shelves, they don’t shop.

You want an example?

The campaign time spent on a flag-burning amendment--it was insulting. How many flags do you burn every week? Is it on your to-do list of weekend chores--”burn American flag,”

or “Go find someone burning American flag and stop him”?

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This was a shop-class seminar, not a philosophy class.

It profiled hypothetical candidates, their strengths and their skeletons, talking through scenarios of how a campaign handles that sort of thing. For $40--$5 an hour, the rest underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trusts--these folks got the absolute best there is of campaign spinners and rainmakers, hacks and flacks, networking and contacts.

But it didn’t, it really couldn’t, get to the deeper matters of why this matters, and the consequences when it doesn’t. How come so many candidates seem alike? Why are campaigns so long? So expensive? And why does all this expenditure of energy and money get so little response?

I was discouraged. Even the cookie in my box lunch, which had looked to be chocolate chip, turned out to be raisins--yet more political feint and fakery, I thought.

I cheered myself up by talking to the bright-eyed class star, Misti Hiltner. She is 26, from Seattle, and a graduate student in atmospheric sciences at UCLA, which makes you think she might have gone to the wrong seminar until you hear her talk passionately about progressive politics and Latino politics and environmental justice.

“What I found so wonderful about this, if I am ever involved in politics, one of the issues I hope for is that we wouldn’t have to be so partisan, especially on the environmental issues I’m concerned about.

“One thing I liked about this seminar was it’s not too idealistic, mixing in this is the practical part of politics and how you can remain, sort of pure, I guess. If I’m ever going to have a life in politics, what’s it going to be like? And I think this helped.

“There are good ways to run a campaign and bad ways to run a campaign, like negative ads. . . . I don’t think it has to be that way. I would hope that it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Thanks, Misti. I needed that.

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Patt Morrison’s columns now appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com