Schumer says that he is accompanied everywhere he goes by two imaginary middle-class friends, who advise him on all manner of middle-class concerns. Their names, until recently, were Joe and Eileen O’Reilly. “For the book’s sake, we wanted them to be more national,” Schumer said, “so they became the Baileys.” The Baileys live in Massapequa, in Nassau County, a town that is invariably known on Long Island as “Matzoh-Pizza.” The Baileys are both forty-five years old: Joe works for an insurance company, Eileen is a part-time employee at a doctor’s office. They worry about terrorism, and about values, and they are patriots—“Joe takes off his cap and sings along with the national anthem before the occasional Islanders game,” Schumer wrote. He elaborated, “They’re not ideologues. They’re worried about property taxes. It’s the tax they hate. And that’s what Democrats don’t get.” He has also drafted the Baileys in defending the C.I.A.’s human-intelligence program: “Had Joe and Eileen been in the room after the hum-int screwup, they would not have indulged in the blame game, gutted the human-intelligence program, or weakened America.”

His imaginary friends used to be Irish, but he thought they were too ethnic for Middle America.