The RP: Why I Love and Hate Fancy Farm

As you read this, hundreds of Kentucky’s political activists are driving down the Western Kentucky Parkway to attend a weekend-full of political festivities, centered around the celebrated Fancy Farm picnic that will take place tomorrow at St. Jerome’s Catholic Church in the tiny hamlet of Fancy Farm, Kentucky.

Fancy Farm weekend represents the very best of American politics — a nostalgic revsiting of true grassroots, retail politicking, filled with stump speaking, great Southern cuisine, and special, deserved attention paid to rural far-western Kentucky, the most physcially remote area of the state, that too often is ignored by the state capital.

Unfortunately, the two-to-three hour political speaking forum at the Fancy Farm picnic represents today’s politics at its very worst — an ugly, often disgraceful exercise in mean-spirited, hyper-partisan name-calling, a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with today’s politics.

Check out this column that I wrote after last year’s Fancy Farm for The Huffington Post:

The first Saturday in August is permanently etched into the calendar of every aspiring state politician — and most political junkies — who make pilgrimage to far Western Kentucky to endure insufferable heat and humidity, feast upon some of the country’s most savory barbecue (Try the mutton… seriously), and participate in a weekend’s worth of small-town meet-and-greets, bean suppers and ham-and-egg breakfasts all over the Jackson Purchase.

Most of Fancy Farm weekend features some of the very best of politics, just the way the old-timers remember it: plenty of hand-shaking and baby-kissing and back-slapping and stump-speaking. For one weekend, the most remote area of the state (and one of the country’s regions worst hit by the flight of manufacturing jobs overseas) gets the full respect and attention of the big city slickers and the state capital politicos. The beleaguered, budget-debilitated press corps also attends in full force, hyping effusive praise on one of the few events that their editors will still pay for them to attend.  Big money media buys be damned: This is grassroots politics at its finest.

But unfortunately, for two hours on Saturday, Fancy Farm represents politics at its very worst.  As political candidates take the stage at 2:00 PM to prepare for their five- to ten-minute speeches, angry, super-partisan crowds lurk right next to the stage, ready to unleash vocal abuse on their perceived enemies. Once the first speaker clears his throat, the acrimonious chanting, the blindly furious yelling, commences. To describe this as “heckling” would be absurd understatement.  This is verbal warfare, and the language used and the insults hurled make a mockery of the tranquil church setting.

Click here to read the full column, “Why Americans Hate Politics.”