Sam Youngman is a political reporter for the Herald-Leader in Lexington, Ky.

If you write about American politics for a living, stop right there. Get back to work, and don’t read another damn word.

Sign out of Twitter, say “thanks but no thanks” to a dayside cable hit, get off your ass, go outside and listen to folks beyond the same 200 know-it-alls in Washington and New York who share your affinity for snark, views on Game of Thrones and predictions for next year’s Senate race in a state only a handful of you have ever set foot in.


The 140-character slap-fight you’re in the middle of with another reporter who has never worked for minimum wage is eating up time that I’m begging you to use trying to win back credibility with a country that desperately needs us to spend more time listening and less time talking.

You might have to look it up, but find humility. A quick glance at the poll numbers for how much Americans trust their media or a two-minute conversation with a voter should do the trick. Remember why you do this for a living.

If you’ve managed to carve out a place for yourself in the shark tank that is the Washington media, you probably see yourself as pretty tough—sign No. 1 that you live and work in a town that long ago broke away from reality. It’s not your fault. Washington is an endless maze of funhouse mirrors, a fact we’re reminded of once a year when the Hill publishes its 50 Most Beautiful list, replete with people who are Washington hot, which is a step above rehab hot and two levels below jury duty hot. All are miles below what the rest of the country considers actual hot.

Growing up, I had a big mouth and a lanky 6’3” frame, a hideous and awkward combination that led to more than a few ill-advised fights. In D.C., I was rarely in a room without another dude who inspired violent tendencies but was too pitiful to punch. Remember that if you do get out of This Town. In a lot of places, folks won’t respond by trying to match your passive-aggressive cleverness with a tweet. They’ll knock you on your ass.

In short, get out of Washington. It’s messing you up more than you know.

***

I had to come back to Kentucky to see it.

I’d arrived in Washington in 2004 to cover energy policy for Inside Washington Publishers before moving on to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, then the Hill and finally, in 2011, Reuters. I made it to the White House beat and broke into the club. I learned how to do sanctimonious and hypocritical with the best of them.

Then, after spending most of 2012 on the presidential campaign trail with Mitt Romney—chasing a story that gets dumber, impossibly more disconnected and sadly more important every four years—I came home this fall to the state where I was born, raised and somewhat educated. My apartment is three times the size of my last one and half the cost, and it’s a little more than a block from Rupp Arena, home to the winningest college basketball team of all time and where I’d have my ashes spread if I weren’t worried a player would slip on them.

Aside from the occasional three hours I’m in Rupp, where cell service is spotty, I’ve never worked harder. The walls of my apartment are bare. My closet is stacked with boxes. I haven’t been on a date since I got here.

And I can’t remember ever being this happy.

Which is not to say I didn’t relish my decade in Washington. There was never a time when I walked through the Northwest Gate of the White House or came out the other side of the terminal at Andrews Air Force Base without appreciating how lucky I was.

My first Air Force One trip was George W. Bush’s last as president and, for me, a comic exercise in pretense. On that short flight to Norfolk, Va., I wore my D.C. smirk, trying and failing to act bored and unimpressed. Of course, I stole two of everything and mailed it all to my mom. I’d have taken my seat with me if it hadn’t been bolted to the plane.

After we arrived in Norfolk, we switched to helicopters and landed on the deck of the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier. I was standing next to an F-18 when Dan Eggen of the Washington Post quietly told me, “You know, Sam, it’s OK that this stuff is pretty cool.”

I can’t recall ever seeing Dan again in Washington, but I’m indebted to him for the advice and the subsequent years of goosebumps and awe, full of experiences I let myself appreciate without the embarrassing posturing. Introducing my mom and little sister to the president. Sitting next to my younger brother, a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the East Room as Barack Obama honored the 2012 National Champion Kentucky Wildcats. And the look on my grandfather’s face when he laid unblinking eyes on the Oval Office.

I remain grateful for Dan’s advice, but I wish he had added one caveat: Know the difference between aircraft carrier cool and Washington cool—it’s easy, and dangerous, to get too swept up in the latter.

I knew I had made it when Obama’s first press secretary, Robert Gibbs, mentioned me in an off-hand comment in the White House briefing room, describing the distance between the White House and the Chamber of Commerce as “a bad Sam Youngman golf shot.” Sadly, I wasn’t even there for my moment of glory. It was even better than getting my first invitation to the annual White House Correspondents Association garden brunch hosted by Tammy Haddad, the party producer and D.C. fixer so memorably skewered this year in Mark Leibovich’s bestselling book This Town. The invitation might as well have been addressed to “the most important reporter in the world.”

In my first years in D.C., when I wasn’t invited to the WHCA dinner itself, I would hang around the Hilton in my rented tux and crash the after-parties. It all seemed so exciting and glamorous and cool to an outsider looking in, but once I was actually admitted to the club, that veneer disappeared. In 2010, the year Jay Leno hosted the dinner, I was fighting off yawns and left early to beat the inevitable traffic snarl POTUS’s motorcade would cause, skipping the after-parties without a second thought because I had an early flight to catch—aboard Air Force One to cover the Gulf oil spill.

Of course, the yawns were a sort of This Town pose too, and it was easy to get sucked right back in. The next year I had the thrill of taking Washington Wizards player John Wall, a former Kentucky star, as my guest to the dinner. Strutting up to the Washington Hilton with Wall while fans screamed out for him, I was reminded of those early years when I would pound bourbons at the hotel bar with a big smile on my face, feeling important through proximity in that way Washingtonians do.

When I was preparing to leave the city, I joked that I’d had dinner with Wall and the president on the night Osama bin Laden was killed. How could I top that?

***

It must be said: Much of my time in Washington was one hell of a party, an endless and decadent blowout bash more suited to VH1’s Behind the Music than working in the nation’s capital.

The first couple years, I spent almost every night downing bourbon—and sometimes indulging in harder substances—at Capitol Lounge before walking back to my studio apartment in Eastern Market, occasionally with some female congressional staffer whose name I was almost always too drunk to remember. (I later sought out and apologized to as many of those women as I could. To the ones I missed: I'm profoundly sorry for my behavior.)

As my self-importance grew, I needed a more pretentious watering hole to match. The bar Off the Record at the Hay-Adams became my second home, and for a long time I couldn’t imagine ever getting tired of seeing former Sen. Gary Hart and Ron Kirk, Obama’s first U.S. trade representative, in the same bar—my bar. Hard as it is to believe, even that thrill eventually wore off.

"I knew I had made it when Obama’s first press secretary, Robert Gibbs, mentioned me in an off-hand comment in the White House briefing room," writes Youngman. | Photo courtesy of Sam Youngman

I suppose part of my disillusionment had to do with my breakup with bourbon, after a real-life, devastating romantic breakup that was followed by a downward spiral. When I returned from my 28 days in rehab, in January 2010, it was harder to ignore the near criminal disconnect between Washington and the rest of the country, especially in an industry that has turned neighbors against each other while its instigators clock out and meet for a beer together, skilled actors who in many cases spend the day feigning hatred for each other on camera but are actually bound by their shared nihilism and reckless self-absorption. In Washington, a divided America is good for business.

The saying there that indicates someone can be trusted as a source or Washington "friend" is that he or she gets the joke. Without a drink (or seven) at the end of the work day, the joke just wasn’t funny to me anymore.

I remember standing on the North Lawn of the White House on a Sunday night late in the summer of 2011, getting ready to do a live television interview during the first showdown over the debt ceiling, which had dragged on for weeks with the federal government on the verge of a shutdown. Shortly before the interview began, I got a call from my brother, who was deployed in Iraq and wanted to know about the latest news in the negotiations. When I told him no agreement had been reached to protect the pay of the troops in the event of a shutdown, he said he had offered to loan money to the guys he was serving with if they didn’t get paid . By the time we hung up, I was almost shaking with anger and frustration.

Of course, by the time White House officials went over the details of the negotiations with me and other reporters a few hours later, I had forgotten my anger as I alternated between taking notes and taking in the grandeur of the White House Roosevelt Room.

By the 2012 campaign, a race almost entirely devoted to image creation and protection, and entirely devoid of romance and meaning, I had grown resolute in my belief that as a profession, we had lost our way. The whole year was one long, drawn-out Jerry Maguire moment. The endless fights with the Romney campaign over the number of Free Trade Agreements Obama had actually signed. Reporting on battles of snark between Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom and Obama strategist David Axelrod while ignoring the actual war we are still fighting in Afghanistan. I do not recall the issue of, say, poverty coming up a single time in all my coverage, despite the fact that 46.5 million Americans were living in poverty that year, the highest number in at least 50 years.

I was so trapped in the bubble of my own artificially inflated ego that I once tweeted a smug remark (the precise wording of which is lost to memory) about a man in Janesville, Wis., after he called me a “jackwagon.” I thought I was funny and for some reason superior to the man, even though he said it after I stepped between him and his son and Rick Santorum. He was a voter who wanted his kid to meet a presidential candidate, but I wanted Santorum to give me a sexy response to some now forgotten shot Romney had taken on The Tonight Show. And at the time, that seemed more important.

After the election, I didn’t want to write about anything. There wasn’t a single Washington story I wanted to cover. Somewhere along a path of unexpected personal success, I had forgotten the most important component of the gig: I had no idea who I was writing for.

***

I had fallen out of love with journalism—something I would’ve thought impossible back when I earned a nickel a word from the Jeffersonville, Ind., Evening News and enrolled in an “Introduction to Journalism” class at Jefferson Community College after three increasingly disastrous (but mostly fun) attempts at college.

I spent my nights working at a grocery store or playing pool and days writing stories read only by the people who clipped them and put them on the refrigerator. I remember leaning over the shoulder of my boss, only for him to stop roughly two seconds into reading my very first story, take off his glasses and lean back in his chair.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Dug Begley, my first editor and later friend, said. “Get this Hemingway/Faulkner bullshit out of your head. That’s not what we do.”

When the story was published, and likely read only by me and the parents of the two area high schoolers who got perfect scores on their SATs, my celebration ended late that night in jail, where I was held for drunken disorderly conduct. But no matter how rocky the terrain, for the first time in my life I was on a path that would lead to places I hadn’t even thought to aspire to. I picked up a college degree from Western Kentucky University—the final tally was five Kentucky colleges in just under eight years—writing for the school paper and hustling whatever stringer and freelance work I could find.

Less than seven years after I moved on from the

Youngman in front of Air Force One. | Photo courtesy of Sam Youngman

Jefferson Evening News and its circulation of 8,000, I had one presidential campaign under my belt and was given the title White House correspondent at the Hill. It was the day before my 30th birthday.

So I was terrified earlier this year when the highs gave way to disillusionment. I didn’t want to be a political journalist anymore, but I didn’t know how—or much want—to do anything else. I had no Plan B.

An editing job came into the picture mid-summer, and I began to prepare for a move to New York. But after I heard about an opening for a political reporter position with the Lexington Herald-Leader, I fired off a résumé, more on a whim than with any real thought to going home.

When the paper flew me down for interviews, my head was still getting ready for Manhattan, the logical next step for a This Towner still looking to trade up. That all changed on my first day in Louisville, spent doing countless interviews in a newsroom with lots of empty desks. I quickly realized that I had been largely inoculated from the struggles of the newspaper industry during my time in D.C.

The trauma of years marked by farewell parties for colleagues who had been laid off was visible on the faces of some of the staff I met, but what struck me most was the positive contrast with the Washington whirl, and especially the unfamiliar and conspicuous absence of ego. Here were people, real people, doing the best they could to put out a great newspaper with limited resources before they went home to spend time with their kids.

I was tempted to look under rugs and in broom closets for a reporter who wore his ambition on his sleeve, coveting a contributor contract with a cable news channel and sadly wasting time tweeting at national reporters in a desperate attempt to feel important.

But over the course of the day, I began to feel the familiar glow from a spark I feared had died. It reminded me of the warmth I had basked in when I first started hanging around newsrooms, writing painfully dull stories off press releases. But this time it had more to do with the possibility that I could help a wounded newspaper get its swagger back, and the simple realization that not only would I know who I was writing for but they would be people I genuinely cared about.

I’d worked hard to get to Washington, and while I was there, I put in the same crazy hours most do. Imagine my surprise to find I could go even harder when doing a job I valued even more. In fact, I’ve learned since my return to Kentucky that there are more news stories here than I can get to.

At least once a week, I hear conventional wisdom from D.C. or New York upended by words directly from the mouths of a Kentucky voter. Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes’s campaign is described as strong nationally, but it looks like a hot mess up close. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), often mocked by cable news, is cheered and encouraged to run for president at small restaurants in impoverished mountain towns throughout Eastern Kentucky.

Usually around 1 a.m., I go through my inbox and return every reader email I got that day, starting with the critics and ending with the fans. In Washington, most of these emails went unanswered, but I would occasionally bang out a smug response that probably, and rightfully, cost me a reader.

***

It’s only been three months, and I’m still trying to kick some of the bad habits that seemed normal after 10 years in D.C . Like relying on polls instead of talking to voters. Building analysis based on the conventional wisdom of other reporters, who are probably guessing. And quoting experts doing the same.

I’m learning that you can, in fact, say no to TV producers. Roger Stone—the former Nixon aide, subject of countless entertaining profiles and all-around Republican wild man—likes to quote Gore Vidal as saying, “Never pass on an opportunity to have sex or appear on television.” And I’m embarrassed that for a long time I not only repeated that quote but generally adhered to its awful logic.

Sitting in the green room at Fox News in the dead of winter during the 2008 presidential campaign, I was tempted to give pollster and longtime Republican message guru Frank Luntz a wedgie when he called me an “idiot” for taking two flights home from Des Moines, Iowa, and two flights back to do a two-minute hit, which for some reason couldn’t be done by remote, during the day on a weekend. I hate to say it because there’s nothing he loves to hear more, but Luntz was right.

That brings me to Twitter, my drug of choice for the last few years. It’s required more restraint than I thought myself capable of, but my hope is that you’ll never see me lose my temper and engage in another asinine, self-defeating battle of snark with some anonymous troll that only hurts my credibility and leaves unquenched bloodlust. (Bloodlust is on the list of D.C. habits I’m trying to kick, too—right above asking people what they do for a living but below driving with my middle finger almost permanently extended and displayed.)

I haven’t written Twitter off entirely, though, for two reasons. First, it’s still a good way to get readers for stories my colleagues and I have written. Aside from the occasional joke I just can’t help, every tweet I write is aimed at growing the Herald-Leader’s audience.

The second and more obvious reason is the responsibility I have to my 10,000 followers to be both hilarious and brilliant. What can I say? Some habits and egomaniacal tendencies die harder than others.

In fact, I recognize that even my return to Kentucky journalism is at base a selfish move; I’m not really trying to save the profession as much as myself. Besides, after a decade in national politics, I wouldn’t know how or where to begin to find honest work. (And, yes, I have learned a thing or two: Keep in mind that the previous sentence is only 104 characters. Plenty of room left to add my Twitter handle, the Herald-Leader’s handle and a link to a story that bemoans the prevalence of ego in political reporting while using the letter “I” more times than the Mississippi DMV does in a year.)

Sounds like a good topic for a Twitter war.

I might someday return to This Town. If I do, I hope it will be with this new mindset and that whatever self-destructive remnants of my ego remain buried deep in the limestone-enriched soil of the Bluegrass.

Short of that, my greatest hope for the political reporters I left behind is that they all find their Kentucky. You’ll know it when you get there.