They are both members of the well-educated media elite with whom you and I would rather have cocktails than with the trailer park dwellers who are on Jerry and Sally and Jenny and all the other TV talk shows. We ought not see the audiences for talk, both on television and radio, as identical. Listeners to my program are better educated, more affluent, slightly older, and more involved in the political process than others. If you want to find out what the brighter people in society think about, listen to certain talk programs. The people who never listen to talk radio and never read the editorial page think they will get from the ether what they need to know.
People believe the most remarkable things.
In 1962, a man named John Kennedy ran for treasurer in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He got elected. He got elected, though no one had ever heard of him before, because the voters, bright wits though they are, assumed that the President of the US was moonlighting as a candidate for treasurer. And he got re-elected because they still thought he was President Kennedy. A young man named John O'Brien some years ago ran for a school committee in Boston.