A New Low: Pandering to ‘Soccer Moms’

Never have I so wanted to be a soccer mom as during the Dole-Clinton debate. That’s the swing-voter group of suburban women that this year’s political fixers have been pitching to, and so, surely, they must have gotten some insight out of the debate that eluded me.

Personally, I thought both candidates came on like a couple of oily salesmen selling something I didn’t need, like Dole’s infomercial home page or Clinton’s special on a bridge to the next century. But what do I know, not being in the target group for this electoral season?

There must be some special code language that has a particular resonance with soccer moms as they buzz around in their minivans filled with kids. Clearly they don’t care about any of the traditional issues. There was no mention Sunday night of race, affirmative action, immigration, or abortion, which might turn off these swing voters. And both candidates agreed that poverty will disappear just as soon as the poor get their act together. Incidentally, just how many hungry people does Clinton need to kick off food stamps before Dole stops calling him a liberal?

Dole avoided specifics on his 15% tax cut, perhaps recognizing that suburban women are just too unsophisticated to understand that cutting government revenues is the best way to balance the budget. Clinton cleverly “targeted” his rival tax cut proposal to benefit anyone in the land, no matter how rich, who might ever be confronted with a bill for her child’s tuition. Such courage.

Suburban women seem to have a thing against guns, so Dole announced that he is in favor of keeping weapons out of the hands of convicted spouse abusers even if that risked alienating his base of support in the NRA. Clinton had the bad taste to take note of Dole’s consistent opposition to anti-gun legislation but got his comeuppance when Dole insisted on not bringing up Whitewater and Clinton’s failure to inhale.

Polling data must indicate that the drug issue plays big with soccer moms, and Dole was quick to establish the unconditional war on drugs as his main theme: “What about drugs that have increased double in the last 44 months? Cocaine is up 141%-- or marijuana. Cocaine up 166%.”

Soccer moms just thrill to that sort of syntax and scattering of statistical data. Actually, cocaine is way down from 1985, when it was used by 5.7 million Americans as compared with 1.4 million today. Maybe Dole was referring to teenage marijuana use, which has increased but is still two-thirds what it was when Ronald Reagan was elected to a second term in the Oval Office. Neither candidate bothered to mention the far more alarming rise in teenage “binge drinking.”

The president was at great pains to indicate that he, too, would never condone rational discussion of the drug issue. Dole deliberately misrepresented Dr. Joycelyn Elders’ call for a reexamination of drug policy as a blanket proposal for legalizing drugs. Characteristically, Clinton refrained from defending his former surgeon general and sputtered out his drug war credentials: “I appointed a four-star general . . . submitted the biggest drug budget ever . . . supported a crime bill that had 60 death penalties. . . I hate drugs. “ Whew, I’m glad that’s cleared up.

Nor did Clinton disagree when Dole absurdly singled out Cuba as “a haven for drug smugglers.” Clinton promised an even harder line on Castro but took pride in the fact that “every single country in Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean is a democracy tonight but Cuba.” This should be of some reassurance to the drug lords in Colombia and to our own CIA.

Both candidates committed to our huge military apparatus while admitting that it is irrelevant to getting Saddam Hussein out of northern Iraq. Dole even wants to dramatically increase defense spending in the hope that a worthy enemy will show up.

In the end, there wasn’t a scintilla of difference between the two candidates’ positions on any issue that mattered, and one was left wondering just how those soccer moms would decide their preference. Perhaps it boils down to the candidates’ makeup. Soccer moms know about makeup because the cosmetics companies are always passing out free samples at the malls. Dole had some sort of weirdly layered pancake makeup that made it seem like he had slits on his cheeks, while Clinton looked unusually pink.

On the other hand, maybe there are no soccer moms. Could it be that they are a figment of the candidates’ too-shallow imaginations and that suburban mothers are given to more complex thought and higher political expectations? If so, they, like the rest of us voters, should feel deeply betrayed by this charade of a debate.