Excerpt:
Do you have a sense of what Leslie Knope’s political affiliation is?
Poehler: It’s funny, you know, because they write her as a pretty complex person. Because Leslie — you would think that initially Leslie would be kind of East Coast liberal Democrat. But she also lives in Indiana and, you know, hunts and kind of comes from a Midwestern background. She has some kind of conservative tendencies. We laugh because Ron represents genuine libertarianism and sometimes conservative views and Leslie sometimes represents the more, you could say, maybe politically somewhat Democratic.
The show is about the fact that there’s a lot of people who work together who have nothing in common except for the fact that they work together, That really describes, to me, national politics. People who have nothing in common except for the fact that they work together and have to find a way to work together and make change happen. Some people get in the way of change happening. Some people spend their whole careers thinking they can make a difference. Other people want to do as little as possible to get the day done. In that way, I think that small microcosm of the parks department kind of represents the larger entity as a whole.
Read the full interview here.
