Obama out to score big with prized demographic: sports fans
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PHILADELPHIA - Sarah Palin remained silent when she walked out onto the Philadelphia Flyers ice to drop the puck before the team's season opener earlier this month, enveloped by a murky mix of boos and cheers from the almost entirely white, largely male crowd she had hoped to win over with the symbolic gesture.
A clearer political message, however, came through seconds later to those watching the Flyers broadcast at home or in bars. The last ad before the game broadcast on
As the best-financed presidential candidate in history, Obama's words and imagery have reached into nearly every nook of American media culture, nestled even within video games and on his own satellite-television channel.
But Obama, who will delay the start of Wednesday's possible World Series Game Six for a 30-minute infomercial, might be making his most aggressive pitch through sports media, which he has used to audition as an all-American everyman before one of the few demographic groups that continue to elude him.
"Obama is targeting so much sports programming because it trends very much to younger white males, which has been a reliable Republican bloc but is also very much an independent voting bloc, so they're going after McCain's strength," said Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political advertising.
In Pennsylvania, where both sides quietly acknowledge that racial tensions have complicated Obama's efforts to attract white Democrats, sports have played a crucial role in his campaign's outreach during the campaign's closing days. On his previous visit to the state, two weeks ago, the only media interview Obama gave was to a Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist.
Yesterday, Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney and the team's retired running back Franco Harris joined union leaders from a United Steelworkers local on their weekly "Steel Blitz" bus tour on Obama's behalf through Western Pennsylvania.
In March, when Sean Smith first called Sportsradio 610 WIP to offer the Philadelphia station an interview with Barack Obama, a producer hung up on him before he could fully introduce himself as the candidate's Pennsylvania communications director. "I think she thought it was a phone-bank caller from the Obama campaign," Smith recalled.
Obama has now spent over $100,000 to advertise on WIP, compared with only $3,000 by John McCain, according to general sales manager Brian Nagy, who notes the station's strength among men between 25 and 54, a demographic that advertisers often struggle to reach.
"When I come in in the morning, my parking lot is filled with Ford pickup trucks, guys going to work on construction sites," said Neil Oxman, a Democratic media consultant in Philadelphia. "They're all listening to 'IP in the morning. They're not listening to NPR."
When Obama finally appeared on WIP's morning show, for five minutes host Angelo Cataldi suspended the inevitable seasonal kibitz about Phillies spring-training prospects to ask the presidential candidate about the speech he had delivered in Philadelphia two days earlier about race.
Shortly after the interview, Smith called Cataldi to tell him that Obama, who played high-school basketball, had hoped to talk about the NCAA tournament. "He really was prepared to do the sports stuff, so we ended up rebooking him a couple of weeks later," said Cataldi. McCain's campaign had yet to contact the station for an interview.
"It is just a chance to reach an audience of people we knew Senator Obama would connect with because he's such a big sports fan, and catch them at a moment when they may not be expecting a purely political message," said Smith. "The people who are still undecided are not necessarily the people who are reading the front page of the paper and watching the local news every night."
When Obama returned to Cataldi's show in April, the two talked about Obama's favorite football teams and his admiration for 76ers legend Julius Erving. "I found that hearing him talk about basketball put him in a different light," said Michael Chu, 31, a doctor and independent who flips between WIP and a rival sports station, WPEN, while driving to work. "For me, it was a much more personal touch."
For Obama, who made news during his first Cataldi interview by referring to his grandmother as a "typical white person," such talk shows offer an unusual perch to maneuver around the issue of his color. Sports remains a sphere where white men are comfortable with blacks in dominant positions, and race tends to arise either as a subject of very frank conversation or not at all.
"We talk so often about so many African-American athletes that we don't relate that much to that," said Cataldi. "It's very rare that racial topics will come up in the course of the show."
Obama occasionally called in to Illinois sports-talk radio while running for office there, according to an aide, and threw out the first pitch at a Chicago White Sox playoff game as a senator. But niche sports outlets have played a central role in his national media strategy from the earliest days of his presidential campaign.
Obama first teased a possible announcement of his candidacy during a December 2006 broadcast of ESPN's "Monday Night Football." Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, he faced off in one-on-one basketball against a Sports Illustrated writer for a magazine feature. Last week, Obama picked a fantasy football team with "ESPN" columnist Rick Reilly, who wrote that he invited both candidates to participate in the stunt. "Only Obama bit," Reilly wrote.
Even McCain, an avid consumer of "SportsCenter" and the "USA Today" sports pages, has noticed Obama's dominance of his favorite media. "While I don't get much time to watch television on the campaign trail, I did see many of these attack ads watching the Arizona Cardinals play the Dallas Cowboys a few Sundays ago," the senator wrote in a recent fund-raising appeal.
Mark Salter, an adviser who travels with McCain, noted half-jokingly this week that the candidate now rarely tunes in to ESPN in swing-state hotel rooms because it is so saturated by his opponent's presence.
"All you see are Obama ads," he said.
