We’ve written before about some political reporters’ unseemly obsession for whatever food they run across on the campaign trail, but we fear this fascination is getting out of hand.
Yesterday, the Kansas City Star was just the latest media outlet to feed readers selected results of a recent poll by Quinnipiac University. Fifty percent of the registered voters polled would “rather have a backyard barbeque” with President Bush than with Democratic challenger John Kerry, the Star reported, while 39 percent would prefer to BBQ with Kerry. The poll also found that voters “would rather have Kerry teach their children” but that “Bush outdid Kerry in the question of which man they would rather have run their business.”
But who believes polls? As one Dr. Howard Moskowitz told The New York Times on Sunday, polls “will tell you what people say they think, but you need more disciplined market research to find out what they’re really feeling and how you can sway them.”
How disciplined is Moskowitz? Well, the Times assures us, he’s an experimental psychiatrist who has “studied the presidential candidates just as he has analyzed products like Prego tomato sauce, Tropicana orange juice and Kellogg’s Froot Loops.”
His conclusions? “Bush reminds me of pizza.” Namely, frozen pizza. This enables Bush to attract indiscriminate voters, Moskowitz opines. “Someone who will eat one kind of frozen pizza will eat most other kinds.” As for Kerry, it’s not so simple. With Kerry voters, Moskowitz found, “you see something like the flavor polarization you find in pickle consumers. Some people like high-impact sour and garlic pickles; others hate them and like a pickle with a mild crunch. You can’t please people by giving everyone a middle-of-the-road pickle.”
So the choice is four more years of frozen pizza, or a pickle that will cause your face to screw up ?
Is this a great country, or what?
–Liz Cox Barrett
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.