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  • Stars, Sex and Gimmickry

    Los Angeles Times
    October 31, 2004 Sunday
    Home Edition

    VOTING;
    Stars, Sex and Gimmickry;
    Vampire slayers, strippers, lowriders want to lure you into the booth

    by Ben Wasserstein, Ben Wasserstein is a writer in New York.

    Last week, Ashton Kutcher took a break from canoodling with Demi Moore
    to appear with Sen. John Edwards in Iowa and Minnesota. Each time the
    "Dude, Where's My Car?" dude charged President Bush with punking the
    citizenry, receptive crowds reportedly shouted back, "True dat!"

    Meanwhile, Bad Boy rapper Sean "P. Diddy" Combs' understated "Vote or
    Die!" slogan echoes through the battleground states he's been touring.
    "If you talking about flexing your power, and you ain't flexing in the
    swing states, then you ain't flexing your power," he told Associated
    Press.

    Reluctant voters have nowhere to hide these days, as Bruce
    Springsteen's "Vote for Change" tour prods them, the country musicians
    of "Your Country, Your Vote" spur them and less-heralded acts use every
    manner of crackpot stunt to wheedle relentlessly.

    This summer's "Just Vote" tour, for example, was powered not by
    baby-boom rockers but vegetable oil, as Bay Area bands Aphrodesia and
    Rock Me Pony chased down unregistered slackers in a van fueled by used
    corn and soybean grease. The Armenian National Committee of America's
    pro-John Kerry tour seeks to wring votes from people with names ending
    in "ian." In the swing state of New Mexico -- which George W. Bush lost
    in 2000 by only 366 votes -- caravans of "lowriders" will accompany
    coveted Latino voters to the polls. And in Florida, transvestites have
    launched a "Drag Out the Vote" campaign.

    Many organizations are exporting people and ideas from solidly red or
    blue states into those of a less-certain shade. For example, the
    Downtown for Democracy political action committee, or D4D, is sending
    hip, young New Yorkers by van to Ohio, disseminating "free designer
    T-shirts, free drinks, political art and music." New York magazine
    summarized the pros and cons of D4D's approach: "Advantages: Free
    designer T-shirts, free drinks. Disadvantages: Political art and
    music."

    Democrats and Republicans kicked more traditional get-out-the-vote
    efforts into overdrive after the too-close vote of 2000. But if the
    election is decided by a narrow margin, the media's post-victory
    spotlights are not likely to fall on the church, club and union
    stalwarts who nag door-to-door or by phone bank.

    Credit will more likely go to fans of the much-missed TV show "Buffy
    the Vampire Slayer" who rallied voters and raised money for Kerry at a
    multi-venue event they called "High Stakes" -- the stake being Buffy's
    bloodsucker-killing weapon of choice.

    Donald P. Green, director of Yale's Institution for Social and Policy
    Studies and coauthor with Alan S. Gerber of "Get Out the Vote: How to
    Increase Voter Turnout," says that face-to-face interactions are the
    key to pumping up poll attendance. "I don't know that making a
    spectacle of it gets people to participate," he said.

    Such thinking has not deflated vote wranglers' enthusiasm for sex and
    celebrity tactics. Leonardo Di Caprio, who plays billionaire Howard
    Hughes in an upcoming film, joins Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas in
    trying to guilt voters to the polls as part of MTV's "Rock the Vote."
    Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in "The Passion of the Christ," is doing
    the same for the evangelical "Redeem the Vote" effort. Singer Sheryl
    Crow is fronting for the feminist "Get Our Her Vote." And P. Diddy and
    Ted Nugent are getting out votes for, well, the Burger King Corp. --
    Slogan: "Have it your way Nov. 2."

    The "Baring Witness" campaign encourages men and women to spell out
    pro-voting messages with their naked bodies. Strip clubs nationwide
    have asked patrons to avert their eyes long enough to register. And the
    group Votergasm encourages people to withhold sex from nonvoters for a
    week after the election.

    When vote encouragement becomes so frenzied, illegal tactics inevitably
    come to light. And it is inevitable that fingers point to Michael
    Moore. In a tour of Michigan colleges, the filmmaker offered gifts of
    clean underwear and ramen noodles in exchange for promises to vote.
    Because it is illegal to pay people to vote in a federal election, the
    Michigan GOP urged authorities to take Moore down. A local prosecutor
    demurred, suggesting her time would be better spent "prosecuting those
    who are delivering cocaine to our young people rather than underwear."

    Not that a crack-for-votes campaign is out of the question. An Ohio
    sheriff has reported that an NAACP National Voter Fund worker admitted
    that she paid a 22-year-old in crack cocaine for the 130 completed
    voter forms he supplied. Those forms came to the sheriff's attention
    because many sported false addresses and the names of Mary Poppins,
    Brett Favre, Jeffrey Dahmer, Dick Tracy and other people who do not
    reside in Toledo.

    So there it is. By hook or by crook, more voters than usual will
    probably turn up this year. Harder to gauge: How many were lured by
    lowriders, how many by lite rockers, how many by lap dancers and, in
    places like Toledo, how many actually exist.
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