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Can I just say I am loving reading Bill Bishop on Slate? Every song is a dance. Today, however, my already acute "Big Sort" confusion grows as he explains that conservatives are more apt to be neat freaks while liberals, who rarely iron, can go weeks without needing to know which stack of papers the cordless phone got lost in. (Dude, where is my corner? Is there such a thing as being un`sortable?) Often, I know, my difficulty with the majority view is plain contrarian; something about hearing that everybody knows X or thinks Y makes my throat scratchy, to the point that agreeing with so many people about Obama is slightly unnerving. (Oh to be you, Rachael!) Only, that wouldn't explain how I swung from conservative slob to silver-polishing liberal, would it? In my 20s, my sister once found my room in the apartment we shared in such disarray that she called 911—and I arrived home to find a police officer standing in my personal space: "Ma'am,'' he informed me, "this place has been ramshackled." No, actually, it was just as I'd left it. So, hasn't recycling made anybody else increasingly fastidious? And I'm curious; how are the rest of you sorting out?
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I really appreciate Bill Bishop's well-argued point in Slate today that there is no women's vote, or even white women's vote, at stake in this election. The idea is that the categories are too broad to be meaningful; even two women of the same race and class who went to the same high school or college may have too little in common to be targeted effectively by the same advertising message. Instead, campaigns should slice and dice by lifestyle—VW-driving moms who don't own TVs, city-dwelling twentysomethings who drink diet soda religiously. We each deserve our own personally tailored message!
OK, I get it, and I bow to the marketing gods of fine dicing—with two caveats. First, I rue the tedious quest for the next great swing voting bloc (soccer moms, hockey moms, offended military wives). Bishop is really arguing against this, because based on his thesis there is no identifiable swing group big enough to get your hands around, at least nationally speaking. But if we forget to dice finely enough, we end up back in the land of the Red Lobster exurbs. Second, I wonder if Bishop's argument about class holds entirely true, at least if you factor in geography. Do white women who make less than $50,000 a year and live in southern Ohio, say, really fracture into lots of little voting pieces? Do white women who make more than $100,000 a year and live in Miami?
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