by aimai
From the NRO mailer that lands in my in box periodically comes this amazing bit of garbled thinking. Obama won voters that no self respecting Democrat would ever have gone for--people who love JayZ, atheists, young women, non white people, people who wouldn't know a political issue like the debt if it jumped up and bit them! That's how low Obama was willing to go--he even tried to appeal to voters who previous politicians as evil as Al Gore and John Kerry refused to appeal to. How low is that? So low that after excoriating Obama and his voters NRO decides that if you can't beat 'em you'd better join 'em.
What cultural markers is the Republican brand associated with? Two things come to mind, the aspects of life that Obama said rural Pennsylvanians cling to, guns and religion. And those are pretty good ones; the country is full of people who take religion seriously and there are a lot of people who enjoy their right to own a firearm, for reasons ranging from hunting to sport shooting to collecting to self-defense. But as we've seen, that's not enough to get a majority of the popular vote or 270 electoral votes, and there are some pretty big swaths of the country -- mostly the West Coast and Northeast -- where those indicators either don't help us or work against us.
So, thinking of new cultural traits the GOP could attempt to adopt as some of their trademarks, just off the top of my head . . . [ellipses in the original]
Foodies? There are a lot of folks who are passionately interested in food, in a way there just weren't a generation ago. (See Vic Matus's great article from a while back on the rise of celebrity chefs.) Why can't the GOP be the Foodie Party, the one that fights moronic dietary laws like Bloomberg's ban on 20 ounce sodas, California's idiotic foie gras ban, the ludicrous talk of the Food and Drug Administration putting even more stringent regulations on raw-milk cheeses on top of the existing ones. (For Pete's sake, slap a warning label on it letting people know about the risk of raw-milk cheeses.) We ought to be standing up to the Nanny State, and making the case that grown adults who we entrust with a right to vote, a right to own a gun, and a right to speak their minds ought to have the right to eat whatever they want.
College-Age Drinkers: Propose lowering the drinking age to 18, on the argument that you'll see less binge drinking on college campuses if 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds can just go into a bar or restaurant and order a beer. If you're really worried about lowering the drinking age across the board, make it legal for those between 18 and 21 to consume alcohol in a licensed establishment, so that a bartender or server could cut them off if there are signs of dangerous intoxication.
I guarantee this would make the College Republicans a heck of a lot more popular on campus. Speaking of which . . .
The beauty of it all is that when Obama appeals to voters the NRO represents it as a bribe, when the NRO does it its merely some kind of ...inducement?
Foodies?
ReplyDelete"Foodies" should rise up against the tyranny of the ban on 20 oz. soda's?
LOL!
"FOODIES?"
Find me a "Foodie" who drinks much feckin' soda - besides seltzer in their scotch or spritzer!
"Yes, Garcon, give me the Chef's 8-course "Taster's Special. No, no martini or carefully selected vintage wine - bring me a Coke. And make it a quart!"
And, uhm, does it occur to these imbeciles, that a whole lot of "Foodies" are pretty well off, and many of them might already be part of the people who vote for the Republicans?
And that the lower-end demographic of non-white voters, the people that the Republicans didn't reach, can't afford to be "Foodies," since we (and I'm white) ain't got no feckin' money, 'cause we ain't got no feckin' jobs?
I'm actually ok with lowering the drinking age, even though that will spike the DWI and DWAI deaths in the country.
I've long said, that if you're old enough to volunteer for the military, you should be able to toast your country with a drink.
This, or course, made a hell of a lot more sense back when we had a draft, instead of a volunteer military.
And then, NRO, what if, after the Democrats go along with the Repubicans on lowering the drinking age, they want to legalized pot?
Then, the Democrats, who probably wouldn't have the "Foodies," could then capture the "Munchie" vote, AND keep the College kids in the "D" column.
FOODIES!!!
ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Marketing poison and stupidity as liberty.
ReplyDeleteTheir specialty.
Yes, its really funny how desperate they are to appear in the pages of the NYT "style" section--they really think that has some kind of extra-ordinary cultural pull that creates electoral success. And they also seem to think that the category "foodie" (for example) can be filled up with anything in the food category from high (caviar, foie gras, endangered species) to low (chik fil a, soda). They grasp that Obama's data mining enabled him to do what the original direct mail wizards did--locate potential voters--but they think that the cultural push went the other way. Rather than identifying voters and coaxing them to vote because of an array of lifestyle choices they think that you can use lifestyle choices to flip voters from one set of interests to another.
ReplyDeleteAnd maybe they aren't wrong. I posted upthread about JMM's blog post about gun right's acvitists. He seems to have discovered some (not surprising, really) who don't own guns and never have but who have been seduced by the ideological argument that someone else should be able to own guns and are as staunchly devoted to the cause as any actual gun owner.
We see alot of Food Network and Cooking Channel in my house. My 6 year old daughter tells me when I should get chopped for what I made for dinner. When the kitchen lights need dusting she berates me like Robert Irvine. So, have the NRO people noticed how gay friendly this "foodie" culture is? Not just urban, costal, elite, metrosexual, but full on gay? They put on that Pioneer Woman show to try for the Palin fans, but it bombed, it sucked, and it was out of place. But maybe they were thinking of sponsoring Nadia G or Man Fire Food.
ReplyDeleteAm I not remembering correctly or wasnt it pres Reagan who used fed hwy dollars to leverage states to raise the drinking age in the few holdout states?
ReplyDelete