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Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Who cares about the people -- as long as they're turned off from voting
Posted by Jill | 6:47 AM
When George W. Bush said:

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.


...he inadvertently revealed a great deal about the Republican Party's campaign tactics. For by harassing voters with robo-calls over and over and over again, claiming to represent the Democratic opponent's campaign, the Republican Party has decided that if a voter needs to leave the phone free, because perhaps his wife is ill and is waiting for the hospital to call, or her daughter is on her way home for a long holiday visit and she's waiting to hear that she's at the train station to be picked up, or he's waiting for a call from his mother's home care aide -- none of that matters when compared to the Republican Party's right to harass voters by pretending to be the other party doing the harassing.

Some voters, sick of interrupted dinners and evenings, say they will punish the offending parties by opposing them in today's elections. But critics say Republicans crafted the messages to delude voters -- especially those who hang up quickly -- into thinking that Democrats placed the calls.

Republicans denied the allegation, noting that their party acknowledges its authorship at the recorded calls' end. After citizens' complaints in New Hampshire, however, the National Republican Congressional Committee agreed to end the calls to households on the federal do-not-call list, even though the law exempts political messages from such restrictions.

Whether "robo-calls" are positive or negative, mean-spirited or humorous, thousands of Americans are sick of them, according to campaign organizations that have been fielding complaints over the past two weeks.

An Ohio woman, who did not leave her name, called The Washington Post in tears yesterday, saying she could not keep her phone line open to hospice workers caring for her terminally ill mother because of nonstop political robo-calls.

Pamela Lorenz, a retired nurse in Roseville, Calif., called her own experience "harassment as far as I'm concerned" and said, "If I were voting right now, the opponent who's doing this, he'd be off my list for throwing that much trash."

Hour after hour and day after day for two weeks, Lorenz's home has received the same NRCC recorded message attacking Charlie Brown, the Democrat who is challenging Rep. John T. Doolittle (R) in a hard-fought battle in northeastern California. "It is a recorder calling," Lorenz said. "I can't call it back to get them to stop."

Voters in Northern Virginia have been exposed to fewer of the aggressive "push poll" type calls than elsewhere. But they said they have been getting so many of the conventional automated calls plugging candidates that they have started hanging up as soon as the recordings begin or screening them with caller ID.


Now, Democrats are just as guilty as Republicans of robo-calling, but at least the Democratic robo-calls identify themselves as what they are, instead of pretending to be from one candidate and only toward the end of the call showing their true colors. I've been the recipient of multiple calls per day from some group professing to represent Italian-Americans (I'm a nonobservant Jew married to a nonidentified half-Italian) telling me not to vote for Bob Menendez because he voted against the confirmation of Samuel Alito. This is kind of disingenuous in light of Thomas Kean Jr.'s campaign ad painting Menendez as bought and paid for by mobsters.

Administration apologists and acolytes may excuse this as "just politics", but federal rules require that groups making these robo-calls identify themselves at the beginning -- something the "astroturf" robo-calls aren't doing.

The Republicans, predicably, are pointing to their own chests and saying, "Moi?" But there are sleuths on the case, who have come up with strong evidence that this is, in fact, a Republican operation.

Democrats have still failed to "get it" after three campaigns in which Republicans have proven that they will do ANYTHING to retain power. We will see today if their tactics worked this time.
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