Been watching the convention on C-SPAN? If you plan to keep watching between Boston and New York, keep an eye out for the focus groups. And beware. They should run a ticker, a la ESPN game scores, at the bottom of the screen: WARNING: INCREDIBLE TIME SUCK! They’re addictive reality television at its lowest ebb. Each group features handpicked characters who are supposed to represent demographics key to this year’s race — NASCAR dads, stay-at-home moms, blacks, Latinos. Most are culled from swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, where people are generally nice and let you cut in traffic. But shut them in a room to talk politics, and they degenerate into characters more conflict-prone than the entire cast of Real World I, II, and III. Puck made more sense than most of these people.
In that sense, at least, they are representative of a pissed-off, polarized country where no one trusts the “facts” presented to them by either party or the media. The New York Times observes most voters have already made up their minds, and members of the opposing party disapprove of the president more than ever before. The group from Dayton that appeared on C-SPAN earlier this week alternately blamed Bush and Kerry for the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas, abortion law, and the war in Iraq. Their chief complaint: The candidates have no mind of their own and are pandering instead to focus groups just like them.
The candidates have reason to care what these characters think. According to The Cincinnati Enquirer, “The ‘Dayton housewife’ set the standard for the average middle-American voter. Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, in their 1970 book The Real Majority, argued that candidates who spoke to her issues win presidential elections.” Or, as one reviewer wrote, they “Attempted to warn the Democratic Party not to pander to ‘trendy’ groups of voters, but instead to focus on the ‘unpoor, unblack and unyoung’ [sic] (that is, the average American voter) in order to achieve success at the polls. Much has changed in this country in the intervening thirty-odd years, but its message is one that, actually, the Republicans have been heeding more nationally.”
As opposed to Dayton Stepford wives of yore, the Enquirer found, “By and large, these swing voters are a gloomy bunch. Asked to describe the mood of the country, they use words like ‘unsettled,’ ‘upheaval’ and ‘falling apart.’” They also use words like “teeter totter” “schmaltzy” and “froggy.” “‘Things start looking good, and then they start to teeter-totter back down,’ said Jody Blair, 33, a Centerville housewife, mom, puppeteer and former teacher.” What do people like Blair really tell us? Not much about the election, but they certainly show a colorful America unafraid to share its opinions — bizarre and baseless though they may be.
One group member said she decided to vote for Bush based on a chain email letter that claimed Teresa Heinz Kerry failed to provide health insurance for employees. If this was genuine Reality TV, she would have been voted out of the airless office space right then. Instead, the C-SPAN moderator kept her hushed up while counterparts dismissed Nader as “a fossil” and “a hippie,” and called Kerry “stiff” and “schmaltzy.” But Cheryl Maggard, 48, a house cleaner from Lebanon, Ohio, came up with the best dis on a candidate yet – “froggy,” for President Bush. She was, of course, talking about his stance on the war in Iraq. “He jumped too quick,” she said, veering off into a mixed metaphor. “You don’t get into a fight if you don’t know where the exit is.”
—Anonymous
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