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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (515723)	12/25/2003 1:15:14 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

CAMPAIGN 2004 Hearts and Minds The Democrats are losing the heart of their electorate. BY JULIA GORIN Wednesday, December 24, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST When my husband and I need a respite from the information and commentary overload that New York's top radio talk station, WABC, gives us, we switch the car stereo to WKTU, "the Beat of New York," as its slogan goes. Once a country-music station, the "New KTU" hit the airwaves as a pop station in 1996-playing a mix of dance, Top 40, hip hop and R&B music and filling what was, amazingly, a vacuum in the New York market. The station is a favorite in the city's outer boroughs and New Jersey. When we switch it on, the soothing, mindless thud of this utterly apolitical song station serves to relieve my aching intellect. It's as though I've entered a different world, one that it's hard to believe is only a switch of the dial away. Rush Limbaugh, Batchelor & Alexander, Sean Hannity and the others don't exist in this world, a fact that often makes me wonder what goes on in the minds of the folks who have their dials set to KTU world permanently--those people to whom radio is for music, and not thinking. The question was answered for me the Monday morning after U.S. soldiers captured Saddam Hussein. It was the morning after the "60 Minutes" program on which Lesley Stahl asked Donald Rumsfeld what the significance was of the capture, and if our military would be making the room temperature where he is very hot or very cold. It was also the morning that an unsmiling Katie Couric, dressed in black, asked Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez whether the whole thing wasn't just symbolic. But it was also the same morning that KTU DJ Diane Prior made the following announcement to her largely working-class and minority listeners in the tri-state area: "There was some great news over the weekend. Our soldiers really have something to be proud of. You can be sure that we'll have a peaceful and safe holiday season because of our soldiers. But it's not over yet and it won't be over until our soldiers defeat terrorism all over the world." When she finished, what sounded like a young black listener called in to give a "shout out" to the 4th Infantry, who made the capture and whose commander--as the proud DJ and caller together pointed out--is from New Jersey. Ms. Prior then dedicated the first hour of her program to the troops in Iraq for their accomplishment, starting with Mariah Carey's song "Hero." What KTU's listeners in Jersey, Staten Island, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and upper Manhattan have is not called intellect. It is instinct, something from which the Lesley Stahls and Katie Courics of the world divorced themselves long ago. So that they could appear to have intellect. In the end, they are left with neither. Which makes the minority and/or working-class KTU fans--who politically fall under what is called the "up for grabs" segment of the population--a class above the media elite attempting to manipulate their thinking. What KTU listeners also have, as the caller reminded us, are brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, wives, husbands, cousins and friends in the military. Considering that KTU listeners represent precisely the demographic that the Democratic Party panders to, all this presents a perplexing paradox to the Democrats (as it does to Stahl and Couric). If the Democratic presidential candidates criticize George Bush for the success of capturing Saddam, they will be out of step with their constituency. If they praise him, they will have to ask themselves, and the rest of us will wonder, why they are running against him. If one substitutes the word "mind" for the word "intellect," and if the ideological war in this country is about winning the hearts and minds, it is also about winning the hearts of the mindless. (No diss intended.) The Democrats have long counted on the heart trumping the mind, but never foresaw it working against them. Ms. Gorin is a contributing editor to www.JewishWorldReview.com and a comedian starring in the monthly show "Republican Riot