My newspaper column: "But how's Tin Man doing in Florida?"

[flowomo]

The latest of my weekly newspaper columns -- published today in The Sentinel (Carlisle, PA)

also available online at: cumberlink.com/articles/2004/10/21/editorial/rich_lewis/lewis01.txt

But how's Tin Man doing in Florida?

By Rich Lewis, October 21, 2004

Trying to write about something other than the presidential election this week is like trying to write about the snacks at a cocktail party when there's an 800-pound gorilla hanging from the ceiling.
The ape sort of distracts attention from the pretzels.
What I want to know is: Who's going to win this thing?
Count me among the "poll crazy" people Tim Grieve wrote about yesterday on salon.com:
"Like a dieter checking the scale each morning, those of us who spend our days hitting the refresh button at PollingReport.com are going crazy over the minute-by-minute back-and-forth of it all. If you know what time the Washington Post puts up its tracking poll each day, you need to admit that you have a problem."
Uh, it's 5 p.m. Problem acknowledged.
But wait a minute - just because I know Christmas is Dec. 25 doesn't mean I have a problem. It just means I think Christmas is important.
And this election is important.
But these polls! Talk about flip-floppers. Your guy is up; your guy is down; your guy is tied.
So I wanted something to break through this fog - a new way of looking at things that taps currents moving deep beneath the surface.
What I found was John Zogby's "Oz Question."
Zogby is a big-time pollster with an excellent track record. His final George Bush-Al Gore poll in 2000 only missed the national results by half of a percentage point.
Right now, Zogby has George Bush and John Kerry dead even at 45 percent each.
But Zogby's Oz Question tells a far different tale.
As a long article about Zogby in this week's New Yorker Magazine explains, he was trying to find a way "to get a handle" on the gnarly 2000 race. One day he devised a question that he thought would give him a better feel for what voters were thinking.
"I called my call center in Utica and said, 'Put this in the poll: "You live in the land of Oz, and the candidates are the Tin Man, who's all brains and no heart, and the Scarecrow, who's all heart and no brains. Who would you vote for?"
The question went in, and the next day, the results were 46.2 percent for the Tin Man and 46.2 percent for the Scarecrow.
"It was right there," Zogby says, "that I knew I wasn't going to know what would happen."
America was perfectly divided on the Oz Question - perfectly divided between Bush's "heart" and Gore's "brain."
And so were the election results. A mere 537 Floridians decided the outcome, with a little help from the U.S. Supreme Court.
So what about this year?
"I asked (the Oz Question) again two weeks ago," Zogby told the New Yorker. "And the Tin Man led by 10 points."
That would be Kerry.
Things haven't changed much since then. This past weekend Zogby said the Tin Man still leads by 9 points.
And Zogby said he thought Kerry would win the election - if there is a big turnout, which seems likely.
Should we take the Oz Question as seriously as Zogby does?
Possibly, because it is based on the same insight that has made Bush's political guru, Karl Rove, such a huge success in running campaigns.
Rove knows that elections aren't about "details" but about "narratives" - which candidate has the clearer, more compelling "story line."
As Joshua Shenk wrote in Mother Jones Magazine last May: Conservatives have "an elemental and appealing narrative - the ideological equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer film or a Tom Clancy novel, the sort that's hard to turn away from."
Shenk says stories "operate on our primitive reptilian brains" and quotes Joan Didion's comment that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live." Shenk says this "isn't just a pretty line but an artful statement of neuropsychological reality."
Well, that's a lot of big words. But the point is good stories capture our imagination and Rove has always made sure Bush has a simple and compelling storyline: Bush is the pious warrior descended from a noble line who wants to rub out the bad guys so he can go home and "tend his plot of land," as Shenk puts it.
Democrats, on the other hand, have rotten storylines. To them, it's all facts and numbers. Dukakis the "nerd." Gore the "human computer." Kerry the "skillful debater."
Truly, Bush is winning the surface narrative again this year.
But Zogby thinks there's a deeper narrative, a story Americans are telling themselves. The Oz Narrative.
People admire Bush's "heart" - his passion and emotion. They are not moved to applause by Kerry's "brain" - his intelligence and thoughtfulness.
Nonetheless, the poll shows people taking the cool brain over the hot heart. The Tin Man over the Scarecrow. By nine points.
Does it really mean anything?
Who knows.
Maybe it's the key to the election. Or maybe it's just another story to pass the time as we inch toward Nov. 2.
At the end of the 1939 movie "The Wizard of Oz," the departing Wizard chooses the Scarecrow "to rule in my stead."
But in the 1985 sequel, "The Return to Oz," the Emerald City has fallen to ruins.
As Zogby sees it, that's bad news for the Scarecrow.

Rich Lewis' e-mail address is [e-mail]