What Your Beer Says About Your Politics 27SEP12

ME? Guinness, microbrews like Fat Tire or Port City or Flying Dog, various German imports, Red Stripe. I can be a beer snot. My politics? Christian Socialist, and I do vote, haven't missed an election yet....

Credit: Tracey Robinson, NMRPP
Americans who most often drink Dos Equis are in the middle-of-the-road while drinkers of Heineken's flagship brand are strongly Democratic. Samuel Adams drinkers are strongly Republican, and more likely to vote.
Beer has a long and storied place in American presidential history and politics.

George Washington famously brewed it. James Madison purportedly sought to create a cabinet-level Secretary of Beer. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped make it legal to produce and sell (again) by championing legislation repealing Prohibition. Upon signing the bill, he reportedly said, "I think this would be a good time for a beer."
As you may have heard, our current president likes his beer, too. Earlier this month, the Obama White House released two official recipes of its own in a blog post entitled "Ale to the Chief."
Of course, this savvy election-year move was not the first time Obama has played the "beer card." In 2009, he famously hosted a "Beer Summit" at the White House to help quell racial tensions.
Beer is also a staple on the presidential campaign trail, with candidates often visiting pubs to show they understand the common man. Similarly, pollsters sometimes ask the question, "Who would you rather have a beer with?" to gauge which candidate has the likeability edge.

Last week, beer poured into presidential politics in an unprecedented way when the beverage's most famous personality - the Most Interesting Man in the World - hosted an Obama fundraiser. You've likely seen him in ads for Mexican beer Dos Equis. His real name is Jonathan Goldsmith.
Some Dos Equis fans were not happy about the fundraiser and expressed their displeasure on the beer's Facebook page, according to Ad Age.
"Mr. Goldsmith's opinions and views are strictly his own, and do not represent those of Dos Equis," said Heineken USA, which imports Dos Equis, in a statement seeking to head off political blow-back.
Clearly, the Most Interesting Man in the World, who "once had an awkward moment, just to see how it feels," has created an awkward moment for the brewing company.
Should Heineken be worried about damage to one of its flagship brands?
Based on the partisanship of beer drinkers, they are wise to be in damage control mode.
We've analyzed Scarborough Research data, which includes 200,000 interviews with American adults, to determine the politics of beer drinkers.
As the bubble chart shows, Dos Equis is a bipartisan brew - Republicans and Democrats both like to drink it. So Mr. Goldsmith's public foray into the 2012 race could alienate a large share of Dos Equis fans.
Ironically, this is in contrast to its corporate sister Heineken, which as it turns out is the most Democratic beer of all. On the other hand, Republicans love their Coors Light and favor Sam Adams, which is brewed just a few miles away from Romney campaign headquarters and whose namesake was an original tea partier.
Dos Equis is not the first - and won't be the last - brand to find itself in a political pickle. From Chick-fil-A to Susan G. Komen to the pizza owner who recently hugged the president, the fallout depends on media coverage, the brand's response, and the political values of its customers.
We continue to advise big brands - who spend millions on consumer research - to make the investment to know where their fans stand politically and to put in safeguards to mitigate a political firestorm.
That being said, the best advice we can give: Stay nonpartisan, my friends.
Will Feltus is the Senior Vice President for media research and planning at National Media in Alexandria, Virginia. Mike Shannon is a partner at the consulting firm Vianovo in Austin, Texas. 
http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/archives/2012/09/the-politics-of-3.php 

Voters Angry At Washington Gridlock May Want To Look In The Mirror 1OKT12

THIS is something I have told many people with reactions from confusion to anger and resentment to agreement. It is true that when it comes to using our vote to end gridlock we are our own worst enemy. From NPR....

by Alan Greenblatt

iStockphoto.com Voters these days often reward politicians who sit at either end of the ideological spectrum while punishing those seen as compromisers.

Like plenty of other voters, Tony Hocamp is disgusted by Washington. Too often, he says, politicians put their partisan interests ahead of doing what's right for the country.
"The politicians we have in office right now are concerned about nothing but themselves and getting re-elected," says Hocamp, who runs a motel in Marengo, Iowa.
It's easy to get upset during a political era in which the leaders of the two major parties seem incapable of putting aside their differences and working together to solve the nation's problems.
But if there's plenty of blame to go around, some of it belongs to the voters themselves. They are the ones who have chosen the politicians. Quite often, they reward those who sit at either end of the ideological spectrum while punishing compromisers.
In part, that's because voters are becoming more like rigid partisans — unwilling to see the other side as having any good ideas or political virtue.
  "The folks who've worked across party lines are generally being replaced," says Joe Hackney, the Democratic leader in the North Carolina House. "The public does ultimately hold the key to that."
Living Separate Lives
Recent polls underscore how much more polarized Americans have become.
Public perception about whether the economy is getting better is increasingly divided along partisan lines. Over the past 50 years, the percentage of people who said they'd be upset if their children married someone from the other party has jumped to 40 percent from 5 percent.
We live in an era when the choice of chicken sandwiches can become a political marker. In one widely noted poll last week, even people's beer preferences were shown to be predictable based on their partisan inclinations.
Increasingly, Americans are going so far as to change their opinions about key issues in order to better match their partisan group, says Bill Bishop, co-editor of The Daily Yonder, which follows rural issues.
"With issues as close to their heart as abortion and gay marriage, people are changing what they believe to stay with their [political] tribe," he says.
Still Sorting
Bishop commissioned a poll, which was released last week, that found people split along partisan lines when it came to their responses to immigration. Fair enough. But they split even more when informed that they were hearing the Republican or Democratic platform planks on the issue.
In other words, just knowing the partisan label behind a position made people more likely to embrace or reject it.
"If you ask people how they feel about the deficit or the DREAM Act, you'll find people are hovering around the middle," says Shanto Iyengar, a political scientist at Stanford University. "But over time, they have internalized the rhetoric they hear, that everyone on the other side is a total fill-in-the-blank."
Iyengar co-authored a new study concluding that people's hostility to the "other" party has spiked in recent decades. There's an echo chamber effect to this.
People are more likely to get their news from partisan news outlets and social media than they were a generation ago. And Americans are increasingly likely to live among people who share similar partisan leanings, says Bishop, who wrote a book called The Big Sort about this phenomenon.
Back in 1976, only about one-fourth of Americans (26.8 percent) lived in landslide counties, which Bishop defines as giving the Democratic or Republican presidential candidates margins of 20 percentage points or higher. By 2008, nearly half of Americans lived in landslide counties (47.6 percent).
Because Americans are able to shop around, in essence, for support for their own opinions through geography and media, they are now more polarized than Europeans — exactly the opposite of what was the case 30 years ago, says Torben Lütjen, a political scientist at the University of Dusseldorf in Germany.
Lütjen is studying heavily Democratic Dane County and heavily Republican Waukesha County in Wisconsin, finding that people in these strongholds have completely separate and distinct worldviews and can't fathom their counterparts in the other place.
"We all love compromise," Lütjen says. "Then again, we only love compromise that serves our own interests."
An Elite Phenomenon?
There are political scientists who believe that it's still mainly the political "elites" — officeholders and interest groups — who are heavily polarized. Average voters, they maintain, are not so ideologically divided.
"The electorate has become more polarized, but not hugely so," says Jonathan Rauch, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution.
Voters are simply responding to the choices they're given by a political and primary system that is "essentially rigged to favor extremists," he says. "You cannot have moderate voters without moderate candidates."
The number of voters who describe themselves as independent has been growing in recent years. Still, even they tend to hold strong partisan inclinations, says Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska.
Many people, regardless of affiliation, subscribe to the mistaken belief that a big majority of Americans think the way they do, she says, and that it's only the intransigence of politicians that keeps them from doing the right thing.
"As with bad breath, ideology is always what the other person has," as the British cultural critic Terry Eagleton once put it.
Not Going Away
The world looks different to voters in, say, Iowa City than it does to those in more rural Marengo, Iowa — or those in liberal Rhode Island, versus more conservative Texas. Rather than simply being a partisan universe of its own, Congress thus mirrors differences that exist among voters in the country.
And those differences aren't likely to fade anytime soon, says Alan Abramowitz, author of the recent book The Polarized Public.
Voters are increasingly divided by race, along cultural lines, on ideological grounds and by geography, says Abramowitz, who teaches political science at Emory University.
"There's a very strong division among white voters that didn't used to exist or used to be very small, based on religious beliefs and practices," Abramowitz says. "For the people who care about them, on those issues, it's very hard to compromise."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/10/01/162084449/voters-angry-at-washington-gridlock-may-want-to-look-in-the-mirror?ft=3&f=127088100&sc=nl&cc=ph-20121003

Where's the Outrage? from HUFFPOST 18AUG11

THIS IS A FANTASTIC COMMENTARY ON HOW STUPID AMERICANS ARE. My job requires me to deal with the public, domestically and internationally, on a daily basis and over the past 10 years I have noticed just how dumb Americans are, especially when compared to people I deal with in other countries. The Americans I have to deal with concerning international matters (my primary job) are the worst, they can't comprehend the international date line, time zones, most of the time have no clue where other countries are and are amazed another countries business laws apply to Americans doing business there. It is pathetic, frustrating and embarrassing. So let's keep cutting the education budget and soon we will be the nation the plutocrats controlling Capital Hill want; docile, dumb drones unaware of what we once were as a nation because it is no longer taught in our schools. 
What explains the ongoing absence of outrage among the general U.S. populace, who watched like lemmings as the truth about the Iraq War came to light, the various absurdities related to the Great Recession unfolded, and continues as the USS America slowly sails toward the edge of an economic abyss? The answer appears to be a combination of political apathy, sheer ignorance, a lack of sophistication, and a high degree of comfort on the part of the average American that shields them from reality.
According to the Federal Election Commission, between 1960 and 2008, national voter turnout has declined from 63 percent to 57 percent for presidential elections, and from 47 percent to 38 percent for midterm elections. Fewer eligible voters are taking an interest in the political process in the United States, which is mystifying given the free flow of information, the transparency of the process, and the stakes involved. Why is that?
Anyone who has watched "Jay Walking" on the The Tonight Show (and knows the difference) must be shocked to see the degree of ignorance among the average person on the street in this country. Rather than being humored by watching how genuinely uninformed people are, I find the exercise pathetic. From the significance of the fourth of July to the identity of Joe Biden, the sad fact is that the average person in this country really has no clue about basic history or who is leading our country. Can it therefore be any surprise that the average person has no idea what is happening in the corridors of power in Washington? Perhaps that is what the politicians are banking on.
A 2009 Harris poll indicated that only 43% of Americans read a newspaper every day. Of the top eight newspapers by circulation in the U.S., number two is USA Today, number five is the San Jose Mercury News, and numbers seven and eight are the Daily News and New York Post -- none being the bastion of sophistication. Nielsen Media Research conducted a ranking of the most watched television programs in the United States between January 1964 and February 2010. Six of the top twelve were sporting events (five of the six being the Super Bowl) and the top two were the finale of M*A*S*H and an episode of Dallas (in 1983 and 1980, respectively). According to Arbitron, the number one radio show in the country based on number of listeners is America's Top 40. According to movieweb.com, all of the top 40 highest grossing films in history in the U.S. have been either science fiction or animation (with the exception of Forrest Gump, at number 23).
How reasonable is it to assume, then, that a person who doesn't read a newspaper on a regular basis, doesn't know the face or name of the Vice President, and prefers science fiction to non-fiction may be expected to know much or care about the political process in this country? The truth is, the average American likes to be entertained; he/she doesn't like or want to know much about 'serious' things, and knows very little about international affairs. According to WikiAnswers, just 27 percent of Americans possess a passport, and the majority of these people use their passports to travel to just three countries: Canada, Mexico, and the UK. So, not only is the general American public not focused on its own politics, it knows virtually nothing about the world, which is quite convenient for those who craft U.S. foreign policy. A public who doesn't know the difference between Austria and Australia isn't very likely to object to dollars spent or actions taken in places they've never heard of nor been to.
The politicians who go on the stump proclaiming to speak on behalf of the American people saying "the American people in their great wisdom want..." don't know what they are talking about, or are deliberately spinning the political process. The truth is, the average American doesn't have much knowledge or wisdom, and simply wants to be left alone and entertained. They have adjusted to the 'new normal' and seem satisfied so long as their daily pleasures remain uninterrupted. So, where is the 'outrage' among the American public? It doesn't exist. If the truth about the Iraq War, being trampled upon by the Great Recession, and heading for economic Armageddon doesn't bring them into the streets, nothing will.
Daniel Wagner is CEO of Country Risk Solutions, a political risk consulting firm based in Connecticut, and author of the forthcoming book Managing Country Risk.

Follow Daniel Wagner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/countryriskmgmt