Even white folks' votes are completely disregarded if they live in uncontested areas:
<blockquote>No Ads, No Visits, No Contest By Marc Fisher <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50120-2004Oct20.html> Thursday, October 21, 2004; Page B01
I see in the paper where there's a presidential campaign on.
If we lived in Florida or Ohio, we might have physical evidence that George Bush and John Kerry seek our votes. Each has visited those states about 30 times this year. Aside from a few fundraisers for fat cats, they've given our part of the country a pass.
If we lived where the candidates thought our votes were worth fighting for, we'd get to see those $333 million worth of TV ads we keep hearing about. Not that I'm dying to see more ads on TV, but that's how candidates are sold, so wouldn't it be nice to be in on the show? If you live in Toledo, you've had 15,000 chances to see how the candidates package themselves. In the Washington area, we've had about, um, zero.
"There really haven't been any spot buys in Washington," says Evan Tracey, who runs TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG, an Arlington firm that tracks political ads. "There's no purpose for a candidate to buy in Washington. Maryland and Virginia are not swing states. In the past, campaigns bought Washington to get to the part of West Virginia that watches Washington TV. But that's not happening this year, because it costs too much money and West Virginia is cutting toward Bush."
We don't matter because we are too efficiently divided. In gross numbers, we've neatly put our conservatives on one side of the Potomac and our liberals on the other. To matter, we need to get out of our comfy red and blue boxes and make some purple.
At first glance, Virginia seems well divided -- Democratic governor, Republican legislature; liberal inner suburbs, conservative outer suburbs. Not good enough: Kerry has pulled most of his staff out of Virginia.
Presidential politics has gone boldly in the opposite direction of much of American society: While we bemoan the loss of local retailers, broadcasters, health care and even funeral homes to faceless national corporations, the business of politics has dropped any pretense of national campaigning. Only 27 percent of Americans live in TV markets where campaign ads are airing this fall. . . .</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>