2 responses so far ↓

• 1 Kevin Carson // Feb 29, 2008 at 6:29 pm

  Soccer mom politics has dumbed this country down beyond redemption. If they’d been around 150 years ago, Lincoln and Douglas would have both spent half their time talking about helping “America’s working families” and appealing to images of families “sitting around the kitchen table.”

  As far as I can tell, all focus groups in either party do is figure out what warm and fuzzy language best panders to the prejudices of soccer moms who don’t know a goddamned thing about anything.

  Back in 2004, I remember Luntz doing a focus group on foreign policy, where soccer/security moms seriously used their experience as mommies as a paradigm for foreign policy analysis: “Well, as a mom I know you have to draw a line, or your kids will walk all over you….”

  When Luntz perfected the tactic of tying together references to Iraq and 9-11 in the same sentence, in order to imply a connection without explicitly making it, it was a deliberate attempt to play on the ignorance of soccer moms.

• 2 Marie // Feb 29, 2008 at 9:14 pm

  Don’t worry! Each of them has zero chance of affecting the outcome.