ON DEADLINE: Where is Joe Six-Pack? Is he single?

Joe Six-Pack is somewhere out there on the campaign trail, coveted and courted by the presidential candidates. He is the electorate, reduced to one guy. He would be really interesting to talk to if we could only find him. Nobody ever seems to say what he looks like or where he is, exactly.

Rumor has it he is, um, a he. The "Joe" is probably a dead giveaway, though Sarah Palin has referred to putting "government back on the side of the people of Joe Six-Pack like me." He probably wears a shirt with a blue collar and lives someplace on Main Street, or at least sometimes goes to Main Street, perhaps to pick up a six-pack.

He likely drinks that six-pack at his kitchen table, where, if he's still married, he and his wife, Soccer Mom, talk about how it feels to personify Middle America and how Washington insiders are out of touch.

But at least they're better off than Six-Pack's cousin, Joe Lunchbucket, a working stiff who has to pack his own lunch and can't even afford beer. Nobody seems to mention him much.

Another prominent resident of their town, Small Business Owner, has it tough, too. To be honest, these days even the guy in the McMansion one subdivision over, White-Collar Elite, faces hardships. He could get laid off anytime. When it comes to heavy mortgages, high gas prices and the other weighty issues of our time, he's starting to look an awful lot like Joe Six-Pack, even if his shirt is a different color.

Fact is, Joe Six-Pack knows a lot of so-called blue-collar types - plumbers, electricians, truck drivers, the guy who owns the local car-repair shop - who make more money than White-Collar Elite. In fact, if you catch them after they've taken off their white or blue collars and put on t-shirts to go watch football, they're awfully hard to tell apart.

Still, Joe Six-Pack is the one the politicians seem to like best. It is generally understood that he is a heckuva nice guy. He drinks, but he never drinks and drives. When he does drive, he would be the last person to tailgate or cut anybody off in traffic. He just Wants What is Best for America.

Maybe the reason Joe Six-Pack sounds so good is that he doesn't exist.

Tagging voters with cliches simplifies them to the point of caricature - and is far removed from reality. People are more complicated than that, whether their employment status is classified as blue-collar, white-collar, retired, self-employed or unemployed. However pollsters might slice and dice the public, there is no Everyman. Thank goodness. That's one of the things that makes the two-year journey to the election interesting.

I grew up in a blue-collar family. My father's name isn't Joe and he doesn't drink beer. Never has. Can't stand the stuff. My mother was a "stay-at-home mom" and didn't go back to work until my brothers and I were teenagers. She wasn't a "soccer mom" or a "hockey mom." Those sports were expensive, too expensive.

My mother did pack my father's lunch each day, and later on, when she went back to work, my father used to pack hers. Did that make either of them "Joe Lunchbucket?" Now that they're retired, what are they? Just what they've always been: People who know the score and have their own opinions about politics and policy, none of which fits the candidates' cliches.

Back when I was a reporter in Wisconsin, I remember getting dispatched to one of President Clinton's speeches to ask voters "in the Heartland" about their views on his impeachment proceedings.

Democrats and Republicans on the talk shows had already offered their caricatures of the average person's opinion. But the people I spoke to - Democrats, Republicans, independent or indifferent - all had nuanced views on the impeachment. They weren't simply pro or con. And I'll bet if I had asked whether they thought of themselves as Joe Six-Pack, Soccer Mom, Main Street or any of the other categories, the answer would have been none of the above.

There used to be a feature on one of the network new shows in which a correspondent picked a spot on the map, went there, closed his eyes and pointed to a name at random in the phonebook. The theme was that everybody has a story, everyone was interesting. No one was the same. And whether the reporter went to small towns, large cities or a lonely house in the countryside, no one was a stereotype.

Yet politicians never seem to see that. Pandering politicians are as old as politics. The idea seems to be that claiming kinship with this or that voting bloc is enough to win that bloc over.

Will the mythical Joe Six-Pack swing this election to one candidate or the other? Remains to be seen. Besides, what I really want to know, if there truly is a Joe Six-Pack out there somewhere: Is he single?

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Sharon Theimer, an investigative reporter, has been with The Associated Press for 16 years.