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I have difficulty sometimes talking to people who don’t race sailboats. When I was a teenager, I crewed Larchmont to Nassau on a 58-foot sloop called Cantice. There was a little piece of kelp that was stuck to the hull, and even though it was little, you don’t want anything stuck to the hull. So, I take a boat hook on a pole and I stick it in the water and I try to get the kelp off, when seven guys start screaming at me, right? ‘Cause now the pole is causing more drag than the kelp was. See, what you gotta do is you gotta drop it in and let the water lift it out in a windmill motion. Drop it in, and let the water take it by the kelp and lift it out. In, and out. In, and out, till you got it.

The voters aren’t choosing a plumber, Mr. President. They are choosing a president. And if you don’t think that your family should matter, my suggestion to you is to get out of professional politics. And if you think that I’m going to miss even one opportunity to pick up half-a-mile boat speed, you’re absolutely out of your mind. When it costs us nothing, when we give up nothing?! You’re out of your mind.

So spake the legendary (if, sadly, fictional) Bruno Gianelli when confronted by The West Wing’s (equally unfortunately fictional) President Bartlett with the assertion that conducting private polling on where the First Family should spend Thanksgiving was “off limits”.

Why raise this? Well, the question of how much notice the so-called “real people” take of politics is very much abroad at present. Exhibit A is Daran’s clarion call for a “yes” campaign that reaches beyond the ruling elite and already converted. Then there is Daniel Finkelstein’s description of a public almost totally unmoved by political machinations, and interested only in results.

It’s true of course that politicos have a dangerously distorted sense of the true impact of their pronouncements, and end up vastly exaggerating the effect of single news stories or the attitude of a given media source. The blogosphere, incidentally, intensifies this, by providing a much larger stream of comment for politicians to get annoyed or delighted about.

It’s also true that most voters could not care less about whether the unemployment statistics have risen one month, or that two politicians from the same party have been caught saying contradictory things. At a UK level, most people know the name of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. And that’s about it. No, really.

So what does this mean for practitioners of politics? Give up and go and do something less boring instead? That would be a mistake, not just for the causes and issues that bring these people into politics in the first place, but also for the rather noble cause of widening public debate.

Where Finkelstein’s analysis takes a left turn for me is in his view that big events like budgets and Queen’s Speeches have no effect at all. Just because voters say they haven’t noticed does not mean it is so. Politics is a bit like having argumentative neighbours; you can’t necessarily hear much of what they’re saying, and you don’t necessarily enjoy having them around, but they are a fact of life and over time you acquire a dull sense of where each member of the family is coming from.

So no, of course, voters don’t know about Gordon’s legislative programme (or, for that matter, who the leaders of the opposition are in the Welsh Assembly). They care little about individual controversies that fill up the column inches and airwaves. But over time, it all accretes. The voters may not hear the words, but they get a basic sense of the messages.

All of which bring me back to the wisdom of Bruno Gianelli. Removing the kelps from the hull is what political campaigning all about, even though the effort seems immense and the rewards appear tiny. Picking up that extra half-a-mile boat speed wherever the opportunity arises is what has to be done if you are to stay in the race. Just don’t expect the spectators to notice you handling the boat hook.