Sorry, I won't be around to discuss this topic, but it is one I understand, not even as a Nascar Mom or Dad, or a Soccer Mom or Dad, but as someone who lives in a rural community being gobbled up by suburban communities, and the labels frequently applied toward both, and perhaps the labels applied toward the urban areas.
I am a "rural" Mom; but a lifelong Democrat, and an even "liberal" democrat at that, although I defy all the labels because I can identify with almost all of these except "fundamentalist" and "neo-con", or frankly for that matter "neo-liberal"...
So here goes, for starters...the Nascar Dads, featured via Tom's Dispatch...
Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, How the Republicans Lost the Garage
This post can be found at:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/...
The 2006 election season ended on November 7 with the crowning of a new Congressional champion, the Democratic Party. Today, less than two weeks later, the NASCAR season ends with the Ford 400 at the Homestead-Miami Speedway in Florida and the crowning of a new Nextel Cup champion. In the piece that follows, Robert Lipsyte, former New York Times sports columnist (who covered Nascar for years) and author most recently of the striking Young Adult novel, Raiders Night, explains just how curiously linked the two events are.
When I was a youth, I worked for a while in a small, tinker-toy industrial strip in Hayward, California, with skilled young printers who were also fervent racing car enthusiasts. They could offer brilliant interpretations of how our world worked without ever leaving the universe of cars. Lipsyte, one of the best sports writers we've had, has the same skill. Back in September in "Shooting Up on Jock Culture" he explored for Tomdispatch readers the deeper meaning of the steroid scandals. He is now officially this website's sports columnist. Expect a new column every second month. The Super Bowl is, to mix sports metaphors, on deck. Tom
Driving Values
By Robert Lipsyte
- It's the Car, Stupid
"I hate that term, NASCAR Dads, it's narrow and patronizing, but it's about time Democrats showed some sensitivity to the stock car culture." -- David (Mudcat) Saunders, political consultant.
The Democrats won the Senate and the House because the Republicans lost the garage.
Four years ago, mad political scientists created Nascar Dad to combat Soccer Mom. The result was as epic as Beowulf versus Grendel's Mother. We know how both those battles came out. And now we also know that Nascar Dad, like the great Scandinavian mercenary, began to wonder if he was protecting the right mead hall.
Like Beowulf, Nascar Dad may be a fiction. Nascar itself denies having any stereotypical fan, while encouraging the idea that it is a political player. Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, described Nascar Dads as "middle-to-lower-middle-class males who are family men, live in rural areas, used to vote heavily Democratic but now usually vote Republican." Most political experts more or less agree with that description, although political consultant Mudcat Saunders adds that Nascar Dads are often suburbanites who are "rural-thinking" about religion, patriotism, hunting, and fishing.
One of the sharpest thinkers in Nascar Nation, H.A. (Humpy) Wheeler, president of the leading North Carolina track, told me back in 2003, "They liked the President's Top Gun performance, but they're not so gung ho anymore on Iraq because this is the crowd that joined the National Guard."
That turned out to be a distant early warning.
Nascar Dad still voted for Bush and Republicans in 2004. Among other reasons, as many Nascar Dads told me then, they thought that Bush was more "manly" than Kerry, whom they despised as the patronizing snot who had been putting them down since grade school.
(keep reading at the link offered above, and you will be suprised) (if you missed it...here it is again)
http://www.tomdispatch.com/...