Nascar events are a home away from home for millions of Americans. Pollsters and politicians would love to be invited over for dinner.
Posted on 01/17/2004 12:25:38 PM PST by Pokey78
FIRST race of the year, the 500 at Daytona, I'm standing next to Nascar dad for the anthem. Takes off his sunglasses, holds his hand over his heart. He's a big man, 40's, 6-foot-3, a gut-sprung 225, biker leather head to toe and a beard on him like ZZ Rasputin.
Comes to the end of our national song, 250,000 people shouting and applauding, flags snapping everywhere, and a sound rumbles low up out of the ovation and comes down out of the sky and breaks out of the clouds like a thunderclap. It's the pre-race flyover, four F-16's with the burners lit, 200 feet off the deck at 400 miles an hour and the crowd goes crazy. The sky cracks and the smell of jet exhaust fouls the grandstands. I, sophisticated tourist sarcast, turn to Nascar dad, cock my eyebrow and shout, "Our tax dollars at work, huh?"
He looks down at me through the beard, blue-eyed and red-faced in the heat. "Damn straight," he says, "damn straight," as the tears roll down his cheeks.
Celinda Lake isn't the place Nascar dad likes to do his bass fishing. Celinda Lake is the name of the Democratic pollster and strategist who coined the term Nascar dad. Nascar dad is, apparently, the white, heterosexual embodiment of the swing voter in this next election, and a great deal of time and effort and money are being spent trying to hunt the poor guy down.
He's defined as a blue-collar wage earner (rural? urban? suburban? just bourbon?) disaffected with politics and parties and willing to throw a vote to the candidate who speaks to his needs. Jobs, education, health care and so forth. Which way he feels on which issues, though, remains a mystery.
He may have a Confederate flag stuck to the bumper of his pickup truck - unless he's driving his wife's Subaru, in which case the bumper reads "Mary Kay" or "Lose Weight Now, Ask Me How." He's out there somewhere, though, wandering the highways, and the candidates are determined to find him.
I spent every mile of an entire season with Nascar dad. Note to pollsters: He's not that hard to spot. Nice guy, but complicated.
He wears khakis and cords and polo shirts, sleeveless T's and cutoffs and souvenir hats. He's bearded and clean shaven, short and long, fat and lean, drunk out of his mind and sober as a Stoic. He wears a mullet; no, he doesn't. He's neat as a Marine; he looks like the last man out of a mine collapse. Sometimes he throws Mardi Gras beads at your wife and yells at her to take off her blouse. Other mornings, the sun tipping the first brightness over the lip of the grandstands, throwing hard shadows, he kneels in a group with the other Nascar dads and prays. Race day is Sunday, after all.
The man the pollsters imagine isn't real, of course. He's a hypothetical, a statistical mean, the median reach of some mystical bell curve. He's a catch phrase, a hot topic, grist for the Sunday morning television mill. He's nothing more than apt tactical shorthand for the campaign ahead. "Joe Six-Pack," they called him once, and "the Angry White Male." Like the political holy ghost, he's everywhere and he's nowhere. At least until Nov. 3.
So why all the hoopla? Fantasy constructions like soccer mom or Nascar dad get stuck in our head because music trumps meaning. The assonance of the matching "ah" sounds in "soccer mom" or the twinned, flat "a" sounds in "Nascar dad" make them easy to say, easy to remember. They're nearly lyrical. They're anapests, tiny metrical feet of three syllables each, spoken short-short-long. They're catchy little show tunes, something you can't stop humming on your way out of the voting booth. Thus Nascar dad, a poem in three syllables, a brand name, a jingle, by Celinda Lake.
Still, the sociopolitical anthropologists and the Eastern establishment think tankers from both parties have been parachuting into the infields and campgrounds of the tracks at Darlington and Daytona, Las Vegas and Fontana, Bristol and Richmond with their clipboards and their digital recorders and their questions, trying in a weekend to understand Nascar dad's complex tribal customs. They don't learn much, of course, except that tasseled loafers and rep ties incite a great deal of laughter in the infield at Talladega.
That's because the race weekends aren't political, they're sensational. Sensory overload on a scale unlike anything you've ever seen. Noise, speed, color, food, drink, appetite, distraction, satisfaction. They're bacchanals, the weekly Woodstock. A vacation from work and worry. Nascar is the opposite of politics.
Sure, a politician makes an occasional appearance as a grand marshal or an honorary starter, which is fine with the crowd as long as the speeches are short and the moralizing and self-aggrandizement are kept to a minimum. After 90 seconds, though, no matter the pol, no matter the topic, the heckling begins. "Start the cars!" they yell. The boos follow at two minutes, and the speaker beats a genial retreat.
Infrequently, a candidate for the House or Senate or the governor's mansion will sponsor a car in one of the preliminary races of the weekend. Truth to tell, people just aren't much interested in it unless the car does well or crashes, like any other car. Elizabeth Dole had her name on a car for a race or two when she was running for the Senate in North Carolina, but the car was a pure-D dog, ugly, underfinanced and slow, and I don't suppose it swung many votes. Howard Dean's supporters now look likely to run a car in some Busch Series races this season. It can't hurt, I guess. More fun than another mass mailing.
The races may not be political, but they're patriotic in a way that isn't often seen in this country any more. It's what you imagine an 1898 Fourth of July to have been, but supersized and wired for surround sound. Bunting, banners, flags everywhere. Flags the size of football fields rolled out by the National Guard or held aloft by giant cranes; souvenir miniflags gripped in the sticky mitts of 20,000 kids; flags stuck on the cars, stitched to the drivers, sewn on the crews. Brass bands and fireworks and live eagles and video sing-alongs and whispered benedictions heavy on military muscle and that Old Testament kung fu.
Stand there long enough, often enough, though, awash in the schmaltz and stagecraft, and even the sarcast, the pollster, cannot help but be swept along, swept up, swept away.
Apart from the classic left/right prejudices and the clichéd defender/detractor misapprehensions inherent in most of what we read about Nascar dad, there's a lot of bad math, too. Statistics come at you like buckshot: 75 million Nascar fans, for example, the first number out of the elephant gun. One-quarter of our entire national population! The mind boggles! More certified cast-iron gearheads than there are French people in France! A Nascar Nation unto itself!
All of which sounds epic, a cultural movement on the scale of Manifest Destiny. A transcontinental clasping of hands! Unaligned voters everywhere! But that jumbo number comes in the press kit from Nascar, and Nascar is in the business of selling not just speed, but advertising reach.
"Seventy-five million fans'' needs to be taken for what it most emphatically is, the in-house estimate of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. Used to woo corporate dollars into the sport, it is based on the broadest possible definition of the word "fan." But what about those turnstile counts? Amazing! The highest average attendance of sporting events anywhere! Hundreds of thousands of undecided blue collars in those grandstand seats each and every weekend!
In a National Review article not long ago, the writer, awestruck, broke the stats down like this: "Nascar's Winston Cup, the biggest of the three 'major league' series in the stock car racing calendar, drew 6.7 million ticketed spectators last year, an average of 186,000 per event. By way of comparison, paid attendance for the N.F.L. in 2002 averaged 66,000 per event, for major league baseball 28,000, for N.B.A. basketball 17,000. TV viewership for a Nascar race runs around 15 million to 20 million. The same as for many Major League Baseball playoff games."
Where to begin? First sentence. Winston Cup, soon to be Nextel Cup, is not the biggest of three "major league" series; it is the only "major league." The other two big circuits under Nascar auspices, the Busch Series and the Craftsman Truck Series, are analogous to the Triple-A and Double-A of minor league baseball.
And if you divide that 6.7 million attendance figure among the 36 races in the Winston Cup, you do indeed get an average of 186,000 people per event. That sounds mighty impressive when compared with the averages for baseball and football. Multitudes! Multitudes!
Trouble is, there are an awful lot more Major League Baseball games and professional football games in this country than there are major league stock car races. Why not try gross numbers instead of averages? Total attendance figures for N.F.L. football last year? About 16 million people. For N.B.A. basketball, about 20 million. For Major League Baseball? Sixty-seven million, plus or minus a few blue collars, annually. Ten times Nascar's fan turnout. Yet poor Baseball Dad sits home alone with no one to poll him.
The last assertion in this breathless series of stats, the 15 million to 20 million television viewers per race for Nascar, is just flat wrong. Marquee races, like the Daytona 500, or the night race at the short track in Bristol, Tenn., or the Brickyard 400 at hallowed Indianapolis, occasionally generate that kind of immense television audience. For other races, though, like the second run of the year at Pocono, those numbers plummet.
Mathematics can be a dismal thicket, especially if you're stalking Nascar dad.
Broadcasting, narrowcasting, bait casting, central casting? Where in the world is Nascar dad?
Sadly, Nascar dad, lionized by left and right alike but understood by neither, has become in the last year another strategic abstraction, another tiny, lifeless stick figure in the dim shadowbox of American politics.
Political cynics on both sides of the aisle, the self-described "cognitive elite," are pretty sure they know what Nascar Dad, the caricature, wants. All Nascar dad wants is another beer, they'll tell you, and an Earnhardt in Victory Lane. Nascar dad wants a 56-inch plasma flat screen. Nascar dad wants to be left alone during the James Bond marathon. Nascar dad wants a brand new 4-by-4 crew cab pickup with a V-10 and the heavy-duty towing package and a 200 mile-an-hour speed limit on the interstate. Nascar dad wants a happy hour booth at Hooters, and a double order of buffalo wings. Nascar dad wants another shot of Jim or Jack or Johnny, another week on disability, another satellite dish, another four-color neck tattoo of a showroom stock '68 GTO.
And that's true, as far as it goes. But Nascar dad wants some other stuff, too.
Nascar dad wants not to be talked down to. Nascar dad wants not to be told what he thinks. Nascar dad wants not to be pandered to by candidates or condescended to by operatives or deconstructed by eggheads and television's talking haircuts.
Nascar dad wants a political process, a president, a government, that make him feel the same galvanizing, heartbreaking pride he feels when he looks at his flag. Nascar dad wants to be moved, inspired, encouraged. Nascar dad wants to be put in touch with his better angels.
Nascar dad wants to know that all his hard work, all his effortful virtue and his diligent vigilance, all his ancient bravery and his bone-deep devotion, all his canny intelligence and his remarkable ingenuity, all his abiding love of country, and all the struggle in his living and his dying, is in service of something much greater than himself.
All that, and a weekend of topless karaoke at the track. These things are not mutually exclusive. As I said, Nascar dad is a mighty complicated man. Look far enough past the "bikini inspector" hats and the rainbow suspenders, the clichés and the rhetoric and the race to catalog the constituency, and maybe you'll catch a glimpse of him. He's right there, in the grandstands at Daytona, one huge hand over his heart for the anthem and standing razor straight.
Jeff MacGregor is the author of the forthcoming "Sunday Money," his account of a year on the Nascar circuit.
Glad to see this reporter is so objective, and that he never lets his personal views seep into his reporting. (/sarcasm)
Maybe it "isn't often seen" in latte-drinking, sushi-eating, New York Times-reading areas like Manhattan, but it's still seen in the rest of the country.
I love confounding the "experts".
Thanks for the post. :-]
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