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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Carragher who wrote (18765)	12/5/2003 11:45:58 AM
From: microhoogle!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793717

While I consider Dean an underdog v/s Bush, I would not underestimate him. It will eventually boil down to the following: 1. Execution of strategy of Dean/Trippi versus that of Karl Rove (have to leave Dubya out of equation ;-) ). I don't think any other presidential advisors have such sound advisors as Trippi or Rove. 2. Who can sway the middle of the ground voters. I think Dean has an advantage here (despite him being labeled lefty. His occasional foot in mouth comments could hurt him though unless Trippi packages at as a result of extempareous speeches to the people willing to digest) 3. The muscle power on the election day. Bush team might have advantage here. This is all after assuming that Dean is going to be the democratic nominee and today's circumstances are prevalent next year.

To: John Carragher who wrote (18765)	12/5/2003 1:52:13 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793717

Soccer Barbie and NASCAR Ken Dr. David Hill is director of Hill Research Consultants, a Texas-based firm that has polled for Re-publican candidates and causes since 1988. Several years ago, a book, Creative Minds in Desperate Times: The Civil War’s Most Sensational Schemes and Plots, documented zany strategies that Confederates and Yankees employed to do each other in. My favorite was a Southern plot to use infected clothes to spread yellow fever in the North. Needless to say, germ warfare was not ready for prime time then. The Civil War is officially over, but new conflicts have emerged and creative minds are still at work coping with desperate times. The best evidence for this perpetual process is a Democratic plot to target so-called “NASCAR dads,” the latest addition to a menagerie of pollster-inspired political prototypes that include soccer moms, office-park dads and waitress moms. Democratic pollster Celinda Lake is given credit for inventing the term. Like Barbie needs Ken, Mark Penn’s “waitress mom” needed a man, and “NASCAR dad” fit the part. NASCAR dads are variously defined but seem mostly to be family-age men in rural areas and small towns in the South. More ecumenical definitions of the NASCAR dad don’t have a regional flavor but are targeted at downscale white males wherever they may watch the races. You have to admire the boldness of this strategy. It’s akin to the Confederates attacking New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Boston, all on the same weekend. NASCAR is a big target. Really big, alone claiming 75 million fans. Seventeen of the 20 highest-attended sporting events in the United States last year were NASCAR Winston Cup Series races. On television, NASCAR has more viewers than any sport except professional football. To promote her discovery, Lake pumped up the numbers, telling Democrats in 2002 that 48 percent of all men are NASCAR dads by virtue of having watched a race in the past year. Democrats took notice. Virginia’s John Warner and West Virginia’s Bob Wise supposedly targeted those voters in successful gubernatorial bids. And Florida Sen. Bob Graham went as far as to sponsor a racing truck in his since-abandoned presidential campaign. Dave “Mudcat” Sanders, who claims that linking Democrat candidates to NASCAR can win votes, mutually advised Warner and Graham. “In the South, white males consider Democrats to be a bunch of wusses,” Saunders told The Christian Science Monitor. “And NASCAR is one way we can move through the culture and start talking about issues and ideology.” Now, the reality of this ridiculous strategy is settling in and the numbers are being adjusted — downward. In a recent Battleground Poll that Lake co-directs, just 19 percent of likely voters describe themselves as “NASCAR fans.” And when Democrats take Mudcat Saunders’s advice to start “talking about issues and ideology,” NASCAR fans realize they are being taken for a ride. Most NASCAR fans are conservatives who support President Bush, especially in his war against terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere. Lake’s September Battleground Poll showed that 65 percent of male NASCAR fans approve of Bush’s performance as president, 11 points above his standing among all voters. Even among female NASCAR fans, Bush garnered a 60 percent approval rating. Not surprisingly, we had to dig these figures out of the “Republican analysis” of the poll results; Lake’s “Democratic analysis” didn’t have a word to say about NASCAR. Perhaps the only clear-cut winner to emerge from this frenzy over “NASCAR dads” is NASCAR itself. In this column alone, the NASCAR brand has already been mentioned 19 times (make that 20). Latte-sippers from Seattle to Boston are being asked by everyone from The New York Times Sunday Magazine to CNN to contemplate the cosmic political soul of what is, after all, a profit-seeking sports industry. Somehow, it seems fitting that a sport known for plastering its contestants and their vehicles with corporate logos has managed to secure for itself the ultimate in product placement — a supposedly critical role in the American political spectrum. “IPod Independents” or “Microsoft Moderates,” anyone? thehill.com