In Garrison Keillor’s invented Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, all politics isn’t just local, it’s personal. That’s why when politics threatens to break out, it usually gets deflected in some comic way. The prim, closed-mouthed picture of George Washington that hangs in Mrs. Meiers’ classroom is the occasion not for stories about American history but for a lecture on “bad teeth-a good lesson for us to remember: to brush after every meal.” Streets in Lake Wobegon are named for presidents, but only remote and obscure ones: Van Buren, McKinley. When, in Keillor’s Leaving Home, democracy erupts in the senior class election for homecoming king and queen, Mrs. Hoffarth edits the voting—“The drawback of secret ballots is the tendency on the part of a few to vote for the wrong person when nobody is looking.” “I mark time by who’s in the White House,” wrote Keillor in We Are Still Married, “starting with Truman, who presided over my childhood.” Keillor’s dad disliked Harry Truman: he was soft on communism and took the Lord’s name in vain. But, “being eighteen, free, and reasonably intelligent,”
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