Microtargeting - Political Marketing Tool That's Either Creepy or Cool - Decide for Yourself

Our national elections are less than three weeks away and we're all being bombarded with political marketing messages.  

I've you're like me, you find most of these highly packaged and super slick messages that are being pushed at us to be a terrible way to elect our leaders.  The issues of the day are highly complex and none of them have simple solutions.  If they did, they wouldn't still be issues would they?  They'd have been solved long ago.  No politician has all the answers even though they all claim that they do.  In the real world, no one likes or trusts a know-it-all.  Why do politicians think they need to pretend they have all the answers and then claim that their opponent is a clueless idiot?  One day a really honest straight-talking politician will hit the scene and take the country by storm.   

I want a politician who will tell me what they believe and how they think.  I don't want a spin-sensitive, word-smithing, equivocating, double-talker who's just looking to tell me what he or she thinks I want to hear.  

The October 2008 issue of "Fast Company" reports on the state-of-the-art marketing tool being used today by all the sophisticated campaign managers and politicians.  It's called microtargeting.  It's a database tool that enables campaign managers to identify undecided voters, learn what is important to them and then target specific messages that will sway them to vote for their candidate.

Here's a quote from the "Fast Company" story:  "We've come up with 30 major DNA strands within the electorate, such as soccer moms, Nascar dads, evangelical earth stewards, country-club Republicans, married-to-their mortgage families.  Then we say, 'These people need war-on-terror messages, these people need education messages, these people need tax messages.'"

This is just good old marketing 101, right?  Identify your target market, learn what's important to them and then deliver a product that satisfies their needs.  Nothing wrong with that.  Or is there?

Maybe I'm too old school, but I'm bothered by the idea of candidates as "products" with features that can be manipulated depending on what microtargeting dictates.   I'd like to think I'm electing someone with principles and ideals that will drive the decisions they make and what they do while they're in office.  How can I determine what a candidate is really all about when they're using microtargeting to tell me just what I want to hear?  It's hard enough to cut through all the bologna in election campaigns as it is.  

If a candidate is trying to cater messages to all 30 of these "major DNA strands" how can I understand their real priorities?  Maybe this is just smart modern day political marketing.  Or maybe this is one of the things that's now fundamentally wrong with the way we elect our political leaders.  

What do you think?