You are misinterpreting the function of these little issues. Little issues don't "build up". Little issues tend to be signals to certain constituencies. For example, nobody has ever lost the vote due to rap music, but Clinton in 1992 signalled to many in the democratic party that he wouldn't be held hostage by the Civil Rights wing of the party by bashing rap star Queen Latifah. It's a low cost signal. Nobody will really care if you bash a rap musician. Same for the community investment act (I forget what this even is). I'd guess that few people are explicitely against it, and it's a cheap way to signal to political moderates that urban issues won't be forgotten by either Gore or Bush.
Consider a similar move for adaoption law. Unlike rap, adoption workers are considered experts in their field. They could bash you on the talk shows. A politician who goes for adoption law as an issue might get smeared as someone breaking up black families. How do you counter that? Well, you could argue that having any parents is better than no parents, but then you'd get into an emotional, difficult argument with people who think that children get unintentially hurt by different ethnicity parents, and that adoptions are moves by wealthy whites to steal kids from blacks in financial straits. Basically, like most family issues, it's messy and emotional issue that probably wouldn't yeild easy points for a politician. Fabio > But politicians spend a lot of energy working on issues that no one has > ever lost an election on. To take one tiny example, both Bush and Gore > made a loud point about their support for the Community Reinvestment > Act. Who votes on that? The logic, I presume, is that positions on a > lot of little issues add up. And it isn't the absolute size of the > issue, but the size relative to the effort that counts. > Prof. Bryan Caplan
