The NYT has an article today on the Obama campaign’s plan for a national advertising blitz. This passage struck me as especially interesting:
The Democratic National Committee has since greatly improved its voter information file, which is now at Mr. Obama’s disposal. But his aides were also considering buying another huge list with information on tens of millions of Americans. The list is owned by Catalist, a private concern co-founded by a longtime Democratic operative, Harold M. Ickes.
In an interview, Mr. Ickes said Mr. Obama’s campaign aides were particularly interested in new information his company had gathered about cable television viewing habits.
Obama campaign officials said that was because they were considering a tailored commercial campaign on niche cable channels that could give Mr. Obama special access to groups that his campaign deemed crucial for victory, like the young audience for MTV and the African-American viewership for BET.
It’s more than a bit ironic to note that Obama’s promise to unite the country may depend crucially for its success on demographically-detailed data about the many ways in which we are divided. That is, a campaign that wants to unite us–that argues, “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America”–cannot assume that we all want to hear the same message. To unite us, Obama will have to tell each of us–liberal, conservative, black, white, whatever–what we want to hear, beaming our very own personally-tailored message to whatever cable channel best represents the market segment of our soul.
Funny.