A Modest Proposal

The old adage goes, “Don’t get mad, get even.” For a select few Americans, that principle could be amended to “Don’t get mad at your enemies, buy them.” I have sometimes thought that if I were Charles Koch, instead of trying to influence American politics honestly, I would do it the way the Democrats do: I would buy the New York Times. With a current market capitalization of $1.23 billion, the New York Times Co. would hardly put a dent in Koch’s net worth.

But Glenn Reynolds has a better idea. Not only is Glenn’s proposal more cost-effective, it would allow Mr. Koch to associate with a better class of people:

My suggestion: Buy some women’s magazines. No, really. Or at least some women’s Web sites.

One of the groups with whom Romney did worst was female “low-information voters.” Those are women who don’t really follow politics, and vote based on a vague sense of who’s mean and who’s nice, who’s cool and who’s uncool.

Since, by definition, they don’t pay much attention to political news, they get this sense from what they do read. And for many, that’s traditional women’s magazines — Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, the Ladies Home Journal, etc. — and the newer women’s sites like YourTango, The Frisky, Yahoo! Shine, and the like.

The thing is, those magazines and Web sites see themselves, pretty consciously, as a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. So while nine out of 10 articles may be the usual stuff on sex, diet and shopping, the 10th will always be either soft p.r. for the Democrats or soft — or sometimes not-so-soft — hits on Republicans.

Glenn has it exactly right. Republicans already do well with high-information voters, but we are getting killed among low-information voters–which is to say, the majority. When I was growing up, even the least well-informed voters knew that free enterprise is vastly superior to socialism. In those days, you had to go to graduate school to see the virtues of socialism. Today, there are many millions of Americans who can tell one Kardashian sister from another, but have no idea that Barack Obama has compiled the worst presidential record since Jimmy Carter. Seriously: they really don’t know. These are the voters we need to reach, and to reach them we need to go where they live. At TMZ, for example. Or The Frisky.

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