NASCAR dads - now you see them, now you don't

If you were in the market for automobile decorations this was a good place to be this past weekend. There was an entire board full of window stickers featuring Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) urinating on various words and phrases - "tailgaters," "Saddam Hussein," and "work." Looking for more than simple bodily function humor? There was another board full of witticisms such as, "Pass with care, I chew tobacco" and "I sure miss my wife. I wish I had better aim."

There were more than just stickers available, of course. There were jackets and hats and the ear-splitting sound of engines roaring around 1.017 miles of asphalt. This past weekend, Rockingham was more than a sleepy town of 10,000 in the south-central manufacturing part of the state. It was temporary home to 50,000-plus stock-car racing fans - capital of what sportscasters like to call "NASCAR Nation." And as such, it was the prime destination for a "NASCAR dad."

If you've picked up a paper or glanced at a newscast in the past few weeks you've heard of the NASCAR dad. He's key to this year's presidential race, we're told - a political riddle in a mullet, an electoral battleground in a Hooter's T-shirt. Perhaps you're a little skeptical, remembering the demographic ghosts of elections past - "soccer moms," "waitress moms." And you wonder if the whole thing is a little too pat. Why do these demographic groups always have three syllables anyway? Why do they keep changing? Do NASCAR dads even exist?

The whole demographic grouping game has always been problematic to me. Take soccer moms, for instance. A lot of kids from a lot of different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds play soccer. Are their mothers really the same? And in the end did they all vote alike? It seemed the media infatuation with them ended as soon as election day rolled around. But I kind of grasped the concept: mothers very involved in their children's lives and focused on issues effecting kids. And I was willing to cut the pollsters some slack on waitress moms. I'd imagine mothers who work as waitresses do share some economic concerns, if nothing else. But the entire NASCAR dad construction sounds bogus - at least the way the press frames it. How can 75 million loyal followers, as NASCAR claims it has, be boiled down to such a tidy phrase?

Still there are important believers out there - President Bush, for one. The president went to the Daytona 500, NASCAR's annual kickoff, two weeks ago to commune with such dads, and even went into the broadcast booth to talk about his love of racing. "I love speed," the president said, semimemorably. It has long been assumed that the NASCAR vote is overwhelmingly Republican - for good reason. Your average NASCAR race looks like a big patriotic slice of "red America" from the armed-services recruiters outside the track, to the fighter-jet prerace flyover, to the country music blaring from thousands of SUVs. So if the powers that be believe in the NASCAR dad, who is he, anyway? To understand that, you have to have some sense of NASCAR. And when you actually attend a race you quickly learn it's different from other sports - more of an event or a spectacle than an athletic contest.

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