Opinion

RISE OF THE OFFICE ROMANCERS

FRED Rodell is said to have responded to a reporter’s question about whether the Yale Law School faculty was “polarized” by proclaiming: “Of course not – they’re far too divided for that!”

In a nutshell, that’s also Mark Penn’s diagnosis of the American polity. He notes that the so-called Red/Blue divide is far weaker than generally supposed, but also points out that American society is, in fact, so splintered that dividing along Red and Blue lines makes it seem almost unified by comparison.

Penn, the Clinton pollster who “discovered” soccer moms and is chief strategist for Hillary Clinton‘s presidential bid, instead slices and dices the American polity into 75 “microtrends.”

Penn defines a microtrend as “an intense identity group [that] has needs and wants unmet by the current crop of companies, marketers, policymakers and others who would influence society’s behavior.” Most of Penn’s book consists of short descriptions of groups he considers particularly significant and unappreciated.

Meet Office Romancers, for example, whose love lives revolve around work and suggest that today’s sexual-harassment laws are outdated. “The office has become the 21st century singles’ bar . . . You are more likely than ever to stumble upon colleagues smooching (or more) on their lunch break,” Penn writes.

Penn also finds some groups whose low profile is kind of surprising: The number of Newly-Released Ex-Cons are swelling as people arrested in the earlier phases of the drug war get out of jail. And he looks at Neglected Dads, a group of men who are far more involved in their children’s lives than their fathers were, but who are almost completely ignored by advertisers and politicians who still think anything involving children is mommy turf.

The kind of fine-grained data that produced Penn’s book also tends to produce micro-policies, cobbled together by politicians who want to build a constituency to win them election. But offering one policy to Office Romancers, another to buy the votes of Newly Released Ex-Cons, plus something to appeal to Cougars (older women who date younger men) and something else for Pet Parents (who have “fur children” instead of actual kids) doesn’t do much to build national unity.

The politics of micro-constituencies exacerbate the very problem of “faction” that the Framers of our Constitution tried to remedy, and does so in a way that underscores the tawdriness of modern politics while undercutting the sense of national citizenship that encourages people to pay the taxes and obey the laws made by those politicians once they are elected.

“Microtrends” does an excellent job of looking at how Americans are different, and many politicians are likely to take lessons from it. I suspect, however, that a different look at the same data might yield interesting insights into what we have in common, and how we might live together even when we differ. Perhaps that will be the topic of Penn’s next book, presumably after the 2008 elections.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee.

Microtrends: The Small Forces behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes

by Mark Penn, with E. Kinney Zalesne

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