— Clinton pollster Mark Penn says the Dems need to reach out to dads to remain relevant (For Democrats, Key Voters May Be Married to Soccer Moms)
According to Mark Penn, whose polls formed the political road map of the Clinton White House, the Office Park Dads, or “OPDs,” are the husbands of those legendary swing voters of 1996, the Soccer Moms. And there is deep political disagreement in these mythic households of American suburbia. While the Democrats were carefully marketing themselves to the Moms in recent years, they lost the Dads, he said.
It’s a fact that men, especially, white men, were the voting bloc that went most strongly for Bush in 2000, with white women only slightly in favor of the President and ethnics of both sexes lining up for Gore (although ethnic men were less enthusiastic about him than ethnic women.) This was a reversal of the pattern in the Clinton elections were men were more evenly divided and women made the difference. But the question is: “what do the Dems have to do to appeal to dads?”
Ask a fathers’ rights activist and he’ll tell you that half of dads are divorced or separated from their wives, or will be someday. Democrats have pushed divorced dads into the poorhouse or the underground economy with child support obligations that are completely through the roof, and an enforcement system that mocks the civil liberties of all Americans much worse than anything John Ashcroft proposes for the war on terrorism. Democrats are largely responsible for a Congressional Resolution on Fathers’ Day urging dads to pay their child support and shut up about it, so they’ve got a lot to atone for. And wishing for something doesn’t make it so.
Source: Ben Domenich and RoboPundit.
The interesting thing about this new “Office Park Dads” definition, from my perspective, is how so many more typical Dems are already rejecting the idea. According to Dem pollster Mark Penn in today’s Hotline:
“If Democrats were able to take some of them back, we would move the country off 49-49.” Penn said “strident rhetoric” against corporations helps “drive” office dads into GOP hands.
But Dem pollster Celinda Lake responds in USA Today by saying that Penn’s prescription would ‘drive us to be the Republican Party:
“Why would you target a group that’s 2-1 against you and also doesn’t want your issues? Why don’t we go after blue-collar men? If we had them, we’d have President Gore. Seriously.”
The fact that many Dems are unwilling to be even a little bit nice to Dads is just very amusing to me. That, and the fact that one of my officemates is already referring to them as “Office Dork Pads.”
Lake’s comments in USA Today are funny. You target a group that went 2-1 against you because there are gains to be made there, obviously. Apparently the architect of the Soccer Mom strategy feels possessive about her place in the party.