Am I a Wal-Mart Woman?

The Wal-Mart Woman is the new soccer mom, but the two have little in common.

So, you know how I hate to be a contrarian, but it's worth disagreeing with Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, who last week told City Paper's Tom Namako that the upcoming election is "not about Sarah Palin." I know what Dean meant, of course — that Democrats have to focus on running against John McCain, not the Moose Shootin' Mama.Except it looks like the Republicans never got that memo, because their campaign is still very much about Palin, and females thought to be like her — the broads who canbring home the bacon, or at least serve it up in your local diner, and look cute doing it: the Wal-Mart Women.

The Wal-Mart Woman is the soccer mom of this election cycle, but aside from gender the two figures have little in common. Soccer moms were a solidly middle-class kind of suburban wife (now leaning toward Obama), while a GOP pollster coined the term "Wal-Mart Women" during the primaries to describe the cohort Hillary Clinton was doing so well with. These are women who tend to be less educated and more likely to work hourly wage jobs than those elitist, now-liberal Soccer Moms, who presumably shop at Target. According to one survey, 41 percent of frequent Wal-Mart shoppers said they made below $35,000 a year, and 39 percent have a high school diploma or less.

In reality, Palin, being college-educated and flush with enough cash to buy her kid a (pre-owned) tanning bed, doesn't quite fit into the demographic. For political purposes, though, her conservative persona is supposed to fit Wal-Mart Women like a 100 percent polyester acrylic, made-in-Vietnam, plucked-off-a-clearance-table glove.

This has not gone unnoticed by the world's largest retailer, which recently unveiled two 15-second in-store videos encouraging the 136 million Americans who crawl its aisles each week — particularly the women — to vote. By way of explanation, a female Wal-Mart executive talked about how "pollsters have found that our core shoppers, Wal-Mart women, are an influential demographic in the upcoming presidential election."

On Monday, while Palin was in Media posing with Joe Lieberman and Arlen Specter, reciting that too-familiar stump speech, I headed to the new Wal-Mart in Deptford to join the rest of the thick-in-the-middle-class masses in flip-flops and elastic-waist pants. I try to stay away from Wal-Mart for the usual political reasons, but they have this one kind of gym pants my kid likes, so there's that. My iPod doesn't have any Carrie Underwood on it, so I listened to "feel-good radio" on the way, trying put myself in a Wal-Mart frame of mind.

The store is staggeringly large and spotlessly clean, but still feels dingy, like the inside of a warehouse store (though actually, the new Sam's Club is way on the other side of the parking lot, near Route 42). It was just after lunchtime, and there were plenty of women around; the only adult men seemed to be employees or browsingsenior citizens. It took a while,but I went through the whole place, from the gardening equipment on one end to the produce section acres away at the other. When it was over, I'dspent $109 and never found the pants. Nor did I see any video encouraging me to vote. That's probably just as well. Nobody goes to Wal-Mart for a civics lesson anyway.

What I did bring back from my trip to retail purgatory, aside from the vinyl Halloween tablecloth, was a reminder of how silly it is to tie a political demographic to a retailer — to project a singular culture onto the customers of an enormous store, andturn a melting pot into a groupshopping experience. One ofmy girlfriends, a black Obama supporter, shops at Wal-Mart. Is she a Wal-Mart Woman? Camille Paglia says she stops in for birdseed. Surely that makes her one?

To the extent that the Wal-Mart Woman label refers to anything at all, it's an economic group — the poorer women who need bargain bins and are, paradoxically, put most at risk by GOP policies restricting female self-determination.

Which reminds me: When I got home and turned on the TV, the cable channels were still dissecting the financial meltdown: politicians ramping up their rhetoric, pundits pontificating. With the holidays coming, it felt like time to get used to being broke and buying cheap. Perhaps we're all becoming Wal-Mart Women now.

Amy Z. Quinn blogs at quinnchannel.typepad.com.