DISPATCHES:Campaigns create fractured electorate

DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet: Playing the demographic game may endanger democracy.

By: Hank Kalet
   Boston Globe writer Jeff Jacoby raised an interesting question this week.
   In a "Web exclusive" column, he asked: Who will American Jews vote for on Nov. 2?
   He reminded his readers that American Jews have tended to vote Democratic (only 19 percent voted for George W. Bush in 2000) and that most would probably do so again this year. He considered it a knee-jerk vote based not on what the candidates were saying, but on what Jewish voters had always done in the past.

   He wasn’t endorsing either candidate, just making the case that Jews this time around would be best served by doing their due diligence, by identifying the issues they feel are important and picking the candidate they think will do the best job in addressing them.
   Seems like sage advice. My question is, why stop with Jewish voters? Why not offer the same advice to everyone?
   Part of the reason may have to do with the way the campaigns and pundits view the American electorate. We have become a nation obsessed with demographics, with carving the public up into manageable subgroups and crafting a message that will appeal to those targeted groups.
   We sell peanut butter to teens using cartoon elephants that sing a rap-reggae jingle. We sell soda to high school and college kids with extreme sports and beer to adult males using half-naked women. And truck makers rely on images of he-man construction workers and country music to hit their target audience.
   Perhaps this may make sense when you’re selling toilet paper or cookies. But there is something unseemly about the way the American electorate is carved up every November into bantustans of identity in order to better sell our candidates.
   Who is winning the women’s vote? What issues are women concerned about? How can candidate X or Y connect with women?
   How will the Jews vote? What about Catholics, Protestants or Hindus?
   Will blacks turn out for the Democrats? Can the Republican Party break the lock its opponents have had on black voters?
   And every four years we get a new "it" group, the one whose allegiance could swing the election. Remember "soccer moms," middle-class women whose lives had been stretched and stressed to their limits by work and family commitments? Their votes were supposed to be the key to electoral victory in years past. Or those "NASCAR dads" of the Democratic primary? And what about our newest brand, the "security mom," who seems to be nothing more than a "soccer mom" with a serious case of the heebie-jeebies?
   Doing so allows the candidates to target elements of the voting public with tailored messages that may or may not reflect the way the candidates really feel.
   This is the genesis of then-candidate George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism, a catch-phrase intended to defuse the revulsion that much of the electorate felt after watching the red-meat culture war rhetoric of the 1992 Republican convention. This was the convention at which Pat Buchanan thundered about the homosexual agenda.
   This kind of thinking also helped map out the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign, a campaign in which Bill Clinton attacked the rapper Sister Souljah at an NAACP convention and took time to fly home to Arkansas to personally supervise the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a severely brain-damaged black prisoner. Doing so, the campaign calculated, would win the candidate enough white votes, especially in the South, without causing liberals and blacks to defect because they had nowhere else to go.
   While these strategies tend to ease the path to victory for many candidates, they create a fractured electorate, one that is forced to view elections through the narrow prism of the interests that have been defined for it by the election professionals.
   There is no doubt that many constituencies have their own concerns — the problems that face American cities are different than those that face the suburbs, which, in turn, are different than those that face rural communities. And men and women have very different relationships to power, as do blacks, Latinos and whites.
   But few candidates are truly interested in addressing these concerns. They pay lip service to a handful of hot-button issues — Israel, affirmative action, prayer in schools — and then resume their divide-and-conquer strategies, and all of us are poorer for it.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected].