My phone just rang and that spiel started. First off Fuck you very much for calling at 9pm at night. Isn’t there some type of law to stop this shit? Secondly fuck you for assuming I’m a conservative voter. I have voted that way a time or two but mostly I vote the other way. And finally a double fuck you for calling me with just an automated machine.
However being a good sport I listened to it and replied. Only to find there was only two questions. Where do I stand on abortion and where do I stand on gun control. THESE ARE THE ONLY ISSUES IMPORTANT TO CHOOSING TO VOTE CONSERVATIVE??? I hung up when they started to rattle off a number to call if I wanted to help out the republican party.
Sadly I know many people who these are indeed about the only issue they have anything more then a vague awareness of. But come on people shouldn’t you delve just a little deeper before you blindly cast your vote?
Ok so the rant sucks but my blood sugar is low and I’m in a pissy mood.
The point of this call, which is going out to registered Republicans, Libertarians and Perotistas (what is that party called these days?) is to find out just how important those two issues are to the conservative constituency at this point in time.
What you do is create an organization that proports to be in support of your enemy. You then create a horrible poll designed to make the candidate look bad.
“Hi Random Caller, I’m Jeff calling on behalf of Senator Slimey. We’d like your opinion on a number of important issues. Do you support Senator Slimey’s bold stance to disarm citizens and arm criminals? Do you agree with Senator Slimey that since black people commit most of the crimes*, they should all be fingerprinted?” etc. (Presumably you’d be far more subtle than I just was.)
Then you have the poll call people at inconvienient times (7:00 AM on a Monday. Dinner time. IIRC political telemarking calls are supposed to stop at 9:00 PM, so 8:59. In the middle of football games and high rated shows.
You can also pay winos to go around forcing leaflets on people in support of your opponent.
No, no, no. These are the only issues important to choosing to vote like an idiot. That the intended responses correspond with the Republican positions is entirely intentional.
I am a registered Republican, and as a young single woman, they don’t like my answers to these questions, either: Limited gun control is okay with me, since I don’t see the framers considering the AK47, and the right to autonomy of the person – a fundamental of Republicanism, indeed, democracy – necessarily includes a woman’s right to choose abortion, at least until such time as there is a rational reason to consider a fetus an independent human being with rights that should outweigh the rights of the mother – which IMO does not include the first trimester of a pregnancy.
So why am I a Republican? Because I’m a fiscal conservative who believes in personal responsibility and abhors excessive government intervention in the rights and responsibilities of citizens. And because I’ll be damned if I’ll leave the party of Lincoln to a bunch of overfed white men who think the true personal autonomy should only be granted to other overfed white men.
Don’t forget the Karl Rove Patented Push Poll, which allows you to spread all sorts of nasty dirt and innuendo against your opponent without actually being held accountable for proving them.
Example: Let’s say you have a guy named “George” who’s running for president. George is losing in the primaries to “John,” merely because John is smarter, wittier, and didn’t have his dad help him dodge Vietnam. All you have to do is get a bunch of flunkies to call up voters and pose as pollsters for a “survey”…
“Hi, Mr. Voter! I’m calling to get your opinion on the upcoming primary between George and John! Just three quick questions, okay? Question #1: If it is revealed that John is a drug-abusing homosexual cannibal who’s secretly plotting with space aliens to enslave humanity and send us all to their spice mines on Pluto, would you be more likely to vote for him or less likely?”
Wow. I’m unfamiliar with such tactics over here, but if that sort of crap really goes on in the US, it pretty much looks like the product of the The Ryan School of Spin Doctorism[sup]TM[/sup], should such a thing exist.
Coldie, most of the excesses I’ve given have been stopped and they where more aimed at local politics rather than national–the big boys knew better. Those tactics may sound fun, but when an investigative journalist figures out that you’re funding someone to impersonate your opponent, it can really really backfire.
The phoney push-poll (which rjung incorrectly attributed to Karl Rove–it dates back to at least the '70s that I’m aware of with labor unions with phone banks doing it) does still exist, but it’s also starting to get backlash
There’s also a (long dead) tactic of putting bumperstickers for your opponent on people’s car without their permission. (Since this is vandalism, I can’t remember a case of this in my lifetime)
Heinlein had a really fun non-fiction book called Take Back Your Government where he goes into detail about this sort of tactic as he’s describing how political campaigns (in the '30s-'50s ) worked from his POV (he campaigned for Upton Sinclair in the '30s and he ran for…um…some office or other…at least once). It’s a lot of fun, though long out of print.
Fenris: Doesn’t mean you can’t find the text of it. Look hard.
Jodi: While I disagree on the specifics of your stand on gun control, I agree and have repeatedly stated the same thing, insofar as my continuing membership in the Republican Party. If Frederick Douglass could see his party now… it’s a crying shame.
Upton Sinclair? Huh. Never would have guessed that one. 'course I guess he was a relative youngster back in the '30’s ( I always have had a hard time visualizing Heinlein as young - for some reason that ‘elder statesman’ thing just blots out every other image of the man for me ).
Oh, I’ve got a copy, but to buy one 'll set you back about $60.00. Baen Books made an idiotic mistake when they tried to tie the 40 year old manuscript to the (gad!) Perot campaign and made it unreprintable by associating it with that.
Please. “The party of Lincoln” has been that only in name since 1876. It’s now the party of Jesse Helms and David Duke. Lincoln would self-identify as a Republican today only in his capacity as a rich white corporate lawyer, not as a progressive with a social conscience. Douglass wouldn’t even think of it. The “overfed white men” are in fact in charge, and have been so for quite a long time.
So you’re a fiscal conservative, are you? Then, if that were a fundamental principle for you, you’d support the people who gave you federal budget surpluses, not the ones who’ve given you deficits even beyond Reagan’s and with no end in sight. What, you don’t? Why the hell not? What was that you said about principles?
You’re in favor of personal responsibility? Well, who isn’t? But you’re a supporter of a President who has shown perhaps the least personal responsibility of any, ever? What principle are you really following?
So you abhor excessive government intervention in the rights of citizens? And you support a party that is engaged in limiting or banning what you do with your own body or with a consenting adult partner? What principle are you following there?
Lament that disconnect between what you’d like the party you’re absolutely loyal to and what it really is if you like, but you won’t change it. Continuing to support a party based on what you think it stood for back in the mid-19th century is beyond naive. You have to support the people who support the same things you do. Voting and donating to a party or candidate based ont the presence of a capital R, or a capital D for that matter, next to their names reflects the kind of ignorance we fight here.
