Sarah Palin
Republican vice presidential candidate, Alaska Gov., Sarah Palin, greets supporters as she enters a campaign rally in Washington, Penn., Saturday evening, Aug. 30, 2008. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)

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An Irish Catholic guy from a coal town who rides Amtrak home from work each night. A "hockey mom" of five who served on the PTA. A 72-year-old Vietnam vet. A biracial kid with a stepfather and a history of moving around.

Sounds like the ideal focus-grouped audience for a campaign's town hall meeting. But this is something very different: It's America as reflected in the 2008 presidential tickets.

Both parties say they want to appeal to "regular Americans," to steamroll the Washington-insider mentality that doesn't understand the average Joe and Jane. While that hasn't happened yet, it's clear that the four candidates for the nation's two highest offices look a lot like America more so than any competing presidential tickets in history.

With Republican John McCain's selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, a woman joins a black man and two senior citizens on the major-party tickets to make one thing certain: For the first time in the history of the republic, there is no chance that either the president or the vice president will be a middle-aged white guy.

These are some of the groups represented among these four candidates: War veterans. Working women. Seniors. Minorities. Christians. Americans who grew up overseas. Small-towners. Parents of young kids. Commuters. Children of divorce. Fishermen.

It's a laundry list of the American experience, embodied in four people who wear very different political stripes.

Obviously, all four are professional politicians, so a great deal of self-identification is happening. The traits they choose to accentuate are just that shrewd packaging decisions. None, for example, is struggling to get by.

But tales of personal experience always sell well in America, land of narratives, a fact that Barack Obama acknowledged Friday when he said that Palin "seems to have a compelling life story." And the filaments linking these four candidates' experiences to the people they would presume to govern seem much more durable than, say, the connection between John Adams and new Americans living in log cabins in the Cumberland Gap during the 1800 election.

With this group, the entry points just keep on coming. If you can't identify with a weekend pickup-basketball player (Obama) or a man who has experienced deep personal misfortune (McCain, Biden), perhaps the anti-abortion parent of a Down syndrome child (Palin) links up with your personal experience.

"The parties are both working hard to reach out beyond their stables to offer more descriptive representation on the ticket than we've seen in a long time," says Costas Panagopoulos, director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy at Fordham University in New York.

Strategists, he says, struggle with this issue because they often find candidates "who are the best possible candidates but don't really connect with the average American. And this year, it seems like they're going for people who, for whatever reason, could make that kind of connection."

Not that politicians haven't tried before. But it can be dicey.

George W. Bush was cast as a small businessman, but he was part owner of a a business that wasn't all that small a major-league baseball team. Jimmy Carter may have been a peanut farmer, but he was also an established intellectual. Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton was more than the fries-scarfing average guy from Hope, Ark., and George H.W. Bush, try as he did, had trouble connecting with regular folks because he was perceived as a privileged easterner.

That instinct to connect is powerful. It taps into the modern American desire to see foibles and life obstacles in our candidates that mirror our lives. And today's voters live more diverse lives, and come from more diverse backgrounds, than their countrymen of generations past.

Is it a sea change, though? Kenneth Long, a political scientist at St. Joseph College in Connecticut, is skeptical.

"I don't think we're going to go back to 1900 where everybody has to be white and male to run for national office," he says. But "the fact that there are all these entry points to a candidate isn't really a solution to the question, `Can I relate enough to that candidate?'"

Roger Nemeth, a demographer and sociologist at Hope College in Holland, Mich., sees hints of a changing America in the choices, which he says tap into "a demographic momentum."

For example, he says, U.S. Census data last week predicted that by 2042, racial and ethnic minorities, if tallied together, will comprise a majority of the population. And that considers nothing about gender, life experiences or age, which is no small issue given the numbers of Baby Boomers poised to become senior citizens.

Additionally, Nemeth says, two major potential voting blocs, women and blacks, were disenfranchised for large chunks of the country's history. Now, finally, the candidates are catching up.

"What I think you're going to see in this election is a much more accurate reflection of the voting population, those who actually go out and vote, than perhaps any other time in America," Nemeth says.

The buffet table of identification points surely makes things more complicated for political strategists, who must parse and interpret a multiplicity of potential voter behaviors.

Will McCain prevail because older Americans tend to vote more? Can Biden offset that? Will centrist supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton turn away from Obama because of the possibilities they see in Palin? Will voters in the two states not attached to the lower 48 show more passion this time around because they have dogs in the race?

Any of these possibilities could happen in 2008, the year America's top political choices really started to look like America's people.

Says Panagopoulos: "One way or another, we're either going to have a president who grew up in Hawaii or a vice president who grew up in Alaska in the White House. How much broader can you get than that?"

Comments about Measure of a Nation can be sent to measure(at)ap.org.

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