For a lot of politics fans outside Washington, the players are only those who wear a special uniform. They have to have a byline or be on TV a lot. But the truth is many of the most important and influential people in Washington are almost complete unknowns outside of their own extended professional circles. Hendrick Smith’s Power Game goes into detail — way too much detail — about this point, profiling hugely important congressional staffers, lobbyists and the like that few off Capital Hill know about. But the point remains true. One such figure is Christopher DeMuth. He’s hardly a household word, even among well-informed conservatives. But he has been enormously influential in Washington and in conservative intellectual circles as the president of the American Enterprise Institute for 21 years (his farewell in on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page today). These days AEI is routinely, almost exclusively, associated with the war in Iraq, at least on the left. Those who make such assertions display their own ignorance. AEI’s influence and reach is older, deeper and wider than the Iraq war and the Bush presidency. AEI’s success over the last two decades has many authors, but the primary author has been DeMuth. He is a charming, brilliant guy, much smarter than quite a few of the scholars at AEI — and none of them are dim bulbs by any stretch. He’s written very little over the years, but I always try to read what he puts out. Now that he’s going to be an AEI scholar rather than it’s President, he will hopefully do a lot more writing, which is the only silver lining of the sad news that he won’t be running the show anymore.