Holy shit. Howard Stern, as almost everyone knows, turned on Bush several weeks ago and has been disparaging him on his show and website every day. I have been saying to friends that if he really wanted to be effective, Stern should first run a voter registration drive. The man has 8 million listeners. If he started getting large numbers of them registered and then got them to vote, he could actually have a huge impact not only on the presidential race, but on races nationwide.
Now he's doing it. Arianna Huffington announced it on her blog:
After a thorough exploration of my sexual history, Howard agreed to co-host a voter registration drive along with Uma Thurman and me. Our goal: to sign up as many of his 8 million listeners as possible. He's even promised to make sure that every guest on his show has registered to vote -- with any luck, all those newly registered strippers, lesbians, and hookers just might provide the margin of victory in November.
This is really huge. I guess it's impossible to know how many new voters we're talking about, but I would think there's no reason to believe Stern listeners are more politically active than the average. Probably less, if anything.
Next idea: put the voter registration link on the front page of his site, and get someone to code it so people can fill out the national voter registration form on-line and print it from the browser.
Howard's audience base is hard-core apolitical...but so was Jesse Ventura's and Arnold Schwarzenegger's. If Stern has a discernable effect then Bush can thank the loons in his administration who run around covering neoclassical statues with curtains for his defeat.
Posted by: mark safranski | April 15, 2004 at 03:09 PM
I listen to Howard Stern and I vote. I felt that I must make this point more clearly, so I designed my very own bumper sticker to that effect:
http://www.cafeshops.com/sternvoter
Check it out. If anything, it will make you laugh.
Posted by: Shasti | April 30, 2004 at 01:57 PM