The Six Pack

First the McCain team accuses Obama of being “pointy headed” and then they define their Vice President as “Joe Six-Pack.” What’s behind the war on sober intellectuals? I work in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, where “six pack” indisputably refers to the stomach area. The gyms are packed with graduate students, thus making this the most pointy-headed, six-pack neighborhood in America.

Merriam-Webster defines “Joe Six-Pack” as an ordinary man, specifically a blue-collar worker. It derives from “the stereotype of a six-pack of beer as a workingman’s drink”. A less flattering definition can be found on Answers.com: “A lower-middle-class male…This disparaging term, first recorded in 1977, conjures up the image of a man in undershirt and construction helmet who will down all of a six pack (six cans or bottles of beer sold in a package) in an evening.” Wikepedia defines the term as a “more pejorative” version of “John Q. Public”, implying a lower class citizen.

“Six Pack” was coined in 1952, but the term “Joe Six Pack” entered the public lexicon in the 1970’s. A Boston Globe reporter (Nolan) asserted that a politician named Joe Moakley was courting “Joe Six-Pack” when he was campaigning for a congressional seat against Louise Day Hicks. Nolan claimed that Moakley was urging working class voters to be more robust in their engagement of political issues. The political undercurrent of the election was racism and school desegregation efforts.

Hicks rose to political prominence for blocking the Boston School Committee from formally acknowledging de facto segregation in the Boston public school system in 1963, and for rigorously opposing court-ordered busing for desegregation purposes in 1965. She served in Congress for one term, and was then narrowly defeated by Moakley, who subsequently served fourteen terms.

Nolan claimed that all of the reader mail he received about the term was negative, accusing him of using ethnic stereotypes. Despite the Nolan backlash, the term became a modern, though often pejorative, version of “John Q Public.” The philosophy behind the term continued to rise in prominence. For example, researchers note that in the early 1970s ABC News launched a new concept called “Eyewitness News” which was intended to appeal to “Joe and Martha Six-pack” or, in other words, “a less educated and less affluent mass audience.”

Bill Clinton was fond of the term but applied it quite different from Palin. Clinton used the term to distinguish himself from the average citizen and thus appear Presidential, whereas Palin uses it to distinguish herself from politicians and thus appear average. In an interview with Time Magazine about the dismissal of the Paula Jones lawsuit, Clinton explained his support for not getting his day in court: “If I were just a private citizen – Joe Six Pack – I would have mixed feelings about not getting a chance to disprove these allegations in court.”

In 2000, two pollsters published a book that Business Week touted as “the importance of Joe Six-Pack”, which laid out a case for appealing to the white working class electorate. The Republicans have to be laser-focused on this strategic approach. Palin is appealing to the boys when she emphasizes her “Joe Six Pack” credentials. McCain’s strongest base is among white married men (roughly 56% McCain, 37% Obama), and among this crowd he does much better with voters who do not have a graduate degree. It’s undeniable that McCain and Palin are courting an important voting bloc, and that it’s Biden’s job to undermine these efforts by emphasizing his own working class roots.

My favorite response so far comes from G. Xavier Robillard, who writes:

“Governor Sarah Palin has claimed that she’s an “everyday, working class American”, and that “it’s time that Joe six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency.” I think so, too, in the same way that I’d like to see a forklift operator operate on my brain.”