Asking the campaigns about policy positions

Politics & Elections
1

So far I’m at zero-for-one.

The Romney campaign website has a number of webforms that can be used to contact the campaign, including this one:

“Policy Information
Get more information about Governor Romney’s stance on the issues.”

There’s just one problem: you can enter your contact information, and select a broad category (“Foreign Policy” in this case), but you can’t ask a question. What you get in return is a noreply stock letter, directing you to the Foreign Policy section of the same website.

I don’t think I need to elaborate on how completely useless this is.

2

As disappointing as it is, I can’t imagine why you would expect anything else. Romney or Ryan are not going to be responding to such questions, and they can’t afford the risk of hiring an army of correspondents to provide personal responses. Who knows what kind of idiocy some zealot might come up with for an answer. So the best they can do is to pick from a menu of canned responses – the only judgement involved would be deciding which on the menu come closest to answering your question.

I would bet the Obama campaign response would be virtually identical. Your choice will then be which canned response do you like more.

3

I have no issue with them being too busy to answer specific questions (though I wish there was at least some way to submit questions for that town hall debate next week), but if they can’t provide more information on Governer Romney’s stance on the issues, they should not imply that they can by creating a webpage and form specifically for that purpose.

4

It’s odd that they would present what are essentially a set of shortcuts to various webpages in that manner. But I wouldn’t get too bent out of shape about it. And transparent hooks for your email address are pretty common on the web.

5

What’d be great is if they used a ranking system (perhaps modelled after reddit, wowhead or epetitions) as a rough guide to which questions the electorate find most important. It could be gamed by 4chan if they got motivated, but I have a feeling there’d be enough interest to generate pressing, difficult to answer questions.