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For several weeks, I've been feeling alienated from this election, and as a '90s guy, I tried to get in touch with these feelings.
I started by visiting a friend who was also suffering
from Electoral Affective Depression. He had a reason,
though. We've been left out this time, Quillen.
He further explained that The last two presidential
campaigns were aimed at us middle-aged white guys in the
hinterlands. The candidates got photographed wearing gimme
caps, they played low-rent games like horseshoes and
snooker, they chomped on pork rinds and Big Macs. They
tried to be as tasteless as we are.
I got the picture. You're right. But this year, they
don't care about us decent salt-of-the-earth hard-working
self-employed entrepreneurial down-home guys. They've
either given up on us, or they're taking us for
granted.
But which is it?
he asked.
I think they've given up on us,
I said. I
can't imagine Bob Dole in a ball cap, and Bill Clinton lets
himself get photographed on a golf course -- what's next,
polo? They're not trying to get us to identify with them
any more.
You got that,
he said. We just don't matter
much these days. Now the target group is 'soccer
moms.'
Our wives were nearby, but upon inquiry, we learned that neither had ever been to a soccer game. So, in order to learn the Mood of the Electorate, I'd have to do some real reporting.
A few days later, I encountered a friend in the Wal-Mart parking lot. She confessed that her kids played soccer.
To get a handle on the most important focus group in this campaign, I started to ask her about how she felt about everything from Newt Gingrich to North Korea, but she cut me off.
I grew up in Kansas,
she said, and since my
family wasn't rich, Bob Dole never did a damn thing for us.
I'd leave the country before I'd vote for him. The way he
sold out on the railroad merger is very typical of his
whole sordid career.
She agreed that she wasn't exactly a representative sample, so I kept my ears open until I found another woman who mentioned hauling kids home from soccer practice.
She had just bought a pistol, she home-schools her
children, and she might vote for a Democrat, she implied,
if the Republican candidate sprouted horns and a tail and
the numerals 666
sprouted on his forehead during a
debate on national television.
But I'm a Jeep Cherokee soccer mom,
she said,
and generally we're a lot different from the Volvo
soccer moms, who tend to be squishy on values. Then there
are Plymouth Voyager soccer moms -- some of them even
belong to unions.
You mean there's no generic soccer mom?
I asked
in dismay, realizing that I had again been led astray by
the spin masters and the national media.
Of course not. We come in all political
varieties.
But you're the Important Swing Voter Group this
year,
I argued. You're supposed to act in
concert.
I think most of us vote in accordance with our
general political beliefs, and I doubt the campaign so far
has changed anybody's mind. And we really don't have much
in common except that our kids play soccer.
Ah, yes, soccer. It made me remember a spring day in 11th-grade PE, when the coach asked us if we'd rather play baseball or soccer.
As a joke, some friends and I began agitating. We
don't want to play the running-dog imperialist yankee
capitalist game of baseball. We want to play the glorious
people's revolutionary game of soccer.
This got us out of class for the day -- any day you can skip PE is a good day -- for some interrogation in the school office, since we had violated 1967 standards of political correctness.
There we assured the assistant principal that we'd just been kidding -- we were all real eager to finish school so we could enlist in the Marines, or something like that.
The school apparently wanted to play it safe, though, and soccer got eliminated from PE for the rest of the year, lest some impressionable youth be led astray.
So this recent spate of respectability for soccer is surprising, but I don't think it will last.
Bob Dole has to come up with something this week, and
there must be some Welfare Soccer Moms out there somewhere,
just waiting to be attacked: Doesn't anybody care?
Soccer is a Third World Game -- poor people play it. It
causes riots all over the world. And there are women on
welfare who should be working, and instead they're
encouraging their children to play this so-called game. You
won't read about that in the Biased Liberal Media. Come on
America, wake up, don't be led around by the
nose...
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