Middletown, Teetering On the Divide

"It was terrible -- it made us look like a bunch of dumb oafs," says Phil Ball, eating breakfast at an IHOP and remembering the documentaries.

Ball, 89, is a retired doctor and amateur town historian whose family came to this area in the early 1800s. (They were the "original" Balls, he points out, not related to the wealthy Ball family that made its money in glass manufacturing here, and after whom the university was named. "Fruit jar Balls," he says with mock derision.)

Ball has written a book called "Dr. Coldwater's Hilarious History of Muncie" and he pens occasional columns for the local paper with headlines like "What's the Latest News From Muncie? Nothing!" He likes it here, he says, because there's just enough to do and because he can get anywhere in 10 minutes and most of all, because he knows it.

"It's a comfortable town," he says.

Not a lot happens here, which was always part of the beauty of Muncie. We talk of "heartland values" and "Main Street" and "Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public." Muncie was all of that. Muncie didn't change. And now?

Muncie is still average, in a sense. If you consider uncertainty to be America's new norm.

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The people of Muncie are not cynical when it comes to politicians, not exactly. But they are savvy.

They say we're not in a recession, says a retired press operator. You try telling the young people that.

They throw back shots and pretend to be like us, says a nursing instructor. I don't want a regular person in the White House. I want someone smarter than me.

They say, Jobs, jobs, jobs.

"I think it's a hollow slogan," says Jeff Lewis, who conducts political polls in Indiana, and who's sitting one evening at a retro-hip pub called Morton's, one of a few places that are trying to breathe life back into the old downtown.