Impressive moves in the voting game

As we slog closer to the presidential election, one cannot help but be impressed by the grand announcements and pronouncements emanating from the White House, all of which are suspiciously timed to appeal to various segments of the voting population.

First there was the revelation by President Bush that Saddam Hussein had been found hiding in a hole, burrowing beneath his home town of Tikrit, no doubt feeding like a gopher on the roots and bulbs he was able to pull from above ground.

Democrats grumbled that he had probably been kept in the hole for months and was finally brought out only when the Committee to Reelect the President felt that the moment was right. But war buffs across the nation hailed Hussein’s capture, and old Dubya’s popularity clicked a couple of notches higher in the polls.

This was followed more recently by Bush’s proposed immigration policy, which many perceived as a direct appeal to the Latino vote. And appeal it did. When it was announced, all of us Latinos danced in the streets, tossing our sombreros into the air and singing “La Cucaracha” in Bush’s honor. Here again, there was protest, but the oles from immigrants drowned them out.

Finally, appealing both to America’s visionaries and its Space Age profiteers, news that the president wants NASA to gear up for a manned flight to the moon and then to Mars took everyone by surprise. It hurled Bush into the Thinking Big category, minimizing the charge by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that he, Bush, didn’t think at all.

The favorable presidential announcements have been unsettling to the Democrats, who wonder what “the Shrub,” as they call him, will do next to appeal to all segments of our voting population.

“If 13-year-olds voted,” one of my angry friends groused, “he’d budget a billion dollars to find a cure for acne.”

The marvel of Bush’s announcements are that (1) the capture of Hussein diverts attention from the fact that Osama bin Laden is still at large, (2) his immigration policy has minimum-wage employers hat-dancing right along with the minimum-wage employees, and (3) any actual trip to Mars won’t be undertaken until Bush is out of office, thereby assuring him a historical connection if it succeeds, while simultaneously relieving him of responsibility should it fail.

I almost forgot the periodic terrorist alerts, the colorful warnings that cause us to cluster like elands in lion country. There is nothing quite so uniting as fear, whether there’s actually something to fear at the time. While elands can’t monitor lion chatter on cell phones and computers, we humans are all eyes and ears when the orange light blinks on. Just as Pavlov’s dog was conditioned to salivate when a bell rang, Bush is training us to tremble when an orange light flashes. And it works.

Other presidents have considered the political aspects of good timing, although not always with overwhelming success. Jimmy Carter, while he may have failed to free our embassy prisoners in Iran, did make a bid for the horny vote when he said in a Playboy magazine interview that on certain occasions he had lusted in his heart. Over women, of course. Unfortunately, while his admission may have swayed the nation’s swinger population, it wasn’t enough to convince everyone else, and he lost his reelection bid.

Bill Clinton similarly lusted, and was caught at it, but by cleverly redefining the term “sex,” he managed to ride out the impeachment by convincing America that what he was doing with Monica Lewinsky was something other than what we thought it was. Scholars are still trying to categorize it.

I’m waiting to see if the current president’s election committee can find a way to cash in on mad cow disease. One way might be to imply that terrorists are responsible. Tampering with our T-bones and burgers could create an emotional crisis not dissimilar from an attack on the Statue of Liberty.

I’ve covered some presidential campaigns, so nothing any candidates say or do in the quest for high office particularly upsets me, because nothing will go unchallenged by opposing interests. Should Bush announce a war on acne, as my friend suggested, I am certain that, while it might please the pharmaceutical companies, it would probably cause an uproar among dermatologists.

My stepfather, a hard-drinking ex-sailor, used to say that pimples wouldn’t be a problem if kids would just quit, you know, touching themselves. I guess the president of the United States probably can’t very well make that kind of public pronouncement, but, given the nature of the quest, it wouldn’t surprise me if he did.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.