Whoever has the microphone

Yesterday was a big day in the hearts and minds of football fans from coast to coast. It was the first day of the NFL draft and everyone was wondering who would get drafted and how high they would go. Leading the charge were the so-called “experts” from the broadcast networks and they pontificated for hours before the draft started about who would go high and who wouldn’t. These were all either sports journalists or former NFL and college athletes who supposedly knew a lot more about the draft than the average fan did.

But they didn’t.

My son who’s a meteorology student at the University of Oklahoma, texted me a week or so ago, telling me that the word around Norman was that their all-star, do everything quarterback, Baker Mayfield, would be the first pick in the draft. Yesterday a good friend of mine in McCook told me the same thing. Curiously, this rumor was not mentioned by the experts evaluating college talents and all seemed to be shocked uniformly when Baker Mayfield was, in fact, the first player chosen in the NFL draft.

Their voices were heard nationwide and ours weren’t because they had the microphones and we didn’t. As it turned out their performance last night was average. They proved they didn’t know any more about who was going to be drafted than most of us watching did but they had the bully pulpit and we didn’t.

Since the election, the bully pulpit doesn’t just exist with sports broadcasters, it exists at the highest level of government. Like him or not, agree with him or not, our President starts almost every day tweeting about something. And more often than not, the tweets are overblown, exaggerated, or just plain false but the base that elected him don’t care. They’ve said all along that they support him because he’s different than anybody that ever held the office because he’s not a politician and they’re right. The feeling is that Trump could do or say anything and his base would not be negatively affected by it and they’re right about that too. That’s because he has the microphone and no one else does. He gets to say whatever he wants, whenever he wants and his supporters cheer him on.

This is a phenomenon we’ve not faced before in American politics and the Democrats are having a hard time dealing with it. They believed that once his misstatements and misdeeds were publicly known it would cause a drastic drop in his poll numbers but that hasn’t been the case. His hard core supporters have numbered around 38 percent since the election and that’s about where the number is today. His numbers are not high enough for him to get re-elected, nor are they high enough to prevent the Democrats from taking back the House and perhaps even the Senate in the off year elections to be held in November but they’re high enough for the President to continue to feel embolden enough to speak his mind every morning, whether it rankles the feathers of others or not.

If you have the microphone, people will listen, if you don’t they won’t. I’m not a Trump fan or supporter so I find fault daily with what he does and says but that doesn’t affect the 38% of the people who would march in lockstep behind him no matter where he was going or why he was going there.

I think it’s dangerous for us to put such faith in one human being that we lose our ability to ever question his motives or ambitions but that’s what a significant percentage of the population has done with this president.

I hope it doesn’t come back to bite them.