I saw this and was wondering whether you'd post it here. It's physically sickening, and honestly, I have trouble believing it's not illegal. (Fraud). If not it damn well should be.
And why isn't this on the front page of the NYT? And the Post, and every other major newspaper in this country? That sickens me almost more than the fact that it's being done, because if things like this were reliably harpooned in the media, they wouldn't be done, at least not so brazenly or so often.
I call bullshit on this "democracy."
I've been out knocking on doors for Tammy Duckworth, and I've encountered a couple of people who told me they weren't voting for her "because she won't stop calling me!"
One woman did hear me out when I told her to listen to the entire call, but one guy pretty much slammed the door in my face. There's a lot of fatigue that goes with being in a closely-contested district -- non-stop commercials, mailers, calls and people knocking on your door. The Republicans are doing everything they can to discourage people from voting.
I saw this and was wondering whether you'd post it here. It's physically sickening, and honestly, I have trouble believing it's not illegal. (Fraud). If not it damn well should be.
I think the Republicans are planning to win the election with this strategy, admit that it's illegal, and then pay a fine of a billion dollars or so.
I think it's the sort of thing that would need a specific statute to ban it (no political robocalls that call back after a hangup? I can't see an argument against such a regulation offhand). Fraud is tricky, because someone who listens to the whole call hears the Democrat being abused, and presumably figures out that the source is a Republican campaign. The deception only operates against someone who doesn't listen to the whole thing.
Maybe harassment? but I don't know the law in that area.
That's the thing about election fraud; if it works, it's totally worth it. The penalties are so minimal, and the rewards (political power) are enormous.
And, the penalties are after the fact, and don't include a new election.
Yes, maybe harrassment. But I think fraud is tenable, provided someone could get their hands on some internal memo/emails/testimony setting out the plan to make the calls seem as if they were coming from Democratic candidates, in order to annoy people. Such memos almost certainly exist, right? Perhaps someone with some integrity working in the RNCC can spill some such memo to the press, or at least testify as to the plan if no such memos exist.
More important than the details, a judge that cares about the system finds some way to prevent these kinds of systemic abuses.
Is this really something new? Or is it the pushback attempt that's new? I'm geniunely curious, and it seems unlikely that this has never been tried before. Robocalls are not a recent innovation.
I think the Republicans are planning to win the election with this strategy, admit that it's illegal, and then pay a fine of a billion dollars or so.
"pay a fine of a billion dollars or so" s/b "smirk and concede 'that there were abuses by both sides'."
Robocalls are pretty new, and I think this sort of fraud is new.
I've read of similar conduct in the past on a retail level, hiring smelly homeless people to canvass door-to-door for your opponent, but I don't think it's been automated.
I think it's the sort of thing that would need a specific statute to ban it (no political robocalls that call back after a hangup?
Closing politicians' exemption for the do-not-call list oughtta do it.
That should happen too, but lots of people aren't on the DoNotCall list, and are still ripe to be defrauded like this.
Good lord, this is disgusting. Has it been reported in any major media outlet?
How effective would it be to file flood of RICO lawsuits against the Republican Party on the State or national level?
15: Offhand I'd say, about as effective as fighting crime by encouraging criminals to commit suicide.
Yeah, my first thought was what Brock said. Where are the judges in all this? And I really like the thought of using RICO laws to go after the Republican National Committee.
More than any other issue, I'd like to see a Democratic Congress really push really sweeping electoral reform. What will make this sort of thing stop is when people start going to jail for 10 years as a result.
really - pick which one you'd like to delete.
In NH, the Do Not Call list applies to politcal robocalls as well (in-person calls are ok), but the RNC is running them anyway. The fine is something like $1k per call, but it's unlikely they'll pay more than several thousand if they are caught because every person illegally called has to file a complaint.
The other alternative that was suggested is to place your own harrassing robocalls to the RNC today and tomorrow and tie up their lines, just like they did in the past to the democrats. You can set up you own robocalls on the internet for about a dime per. (I do not really recommend breaking the law, but I thought it would be poetic justice.)
18 - maybe. Though the law will probably be poorly written, and end up targeting the wrong people while allowing huge loopholes for the usual shenanigans. When I was on the Dean campaign, we literally couldn't take the phone calls from anyone at Meetup.com, lest we face many years in a federal prison thanks to McCain-Feingold. I'm not even joking.
20- there can't be a class-action?
I'd like to third the RICO suggestion. If for nothing else than to publicizes exactly what's going on. Again it boggles my mind that this isn't on the front page of every newspaper/news site in the country.
A RICO suit would be politically ridiculous, it would play right into charges that the Democrats don't play fair and are trying to settle political disputes in the courts, which allegations would get much more play than the offenses which led to the suit in the first place.
The NRCC would have to do a lot more than this to shock me anew. Granting fake awards to doctors in exchange for donations is jaw-droppingly dishonest. (Of course their awards for businessmen are much more popular...)
(Previous post should not be read to imply that Rob/ert Sitz/ler is a doctor as in M.D.. He's not. But he is the 2004 NRCC Doctor of the Year all the same.)
As the Republicans say, 'Who Cares What You Think'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9wp1e-ezOI
RICO's a no-go. For RICO, you need 'injury to business or property' -- loss of money.
That's the problem with suing over stuff like this -- the individual damage to each plaintiff is very hard to describe.
This would be more convincing if the one example I've heard weren't obviously an attack on the named candidate.
See my 5. Someone who hangs up after the first sentence hears the name of the Democrat -- the first sentence is identifying but neutral -- and gets called back over and over again. Someone who doesn't hang up gets the whole negative spiel, and no call-backs.
Why are you trying to ruin our RNCC bashing, FL? Be gone, you and your silly facts!
(I'm normally a reasonable person, prety middle-of the road politically, and the fact that I was willling to believe this claim on a completely unsubstantiated basis really testifies to the fact that either (1) I'm going crazy or (2) the Republican party has done some really shameless things in recent years. Regardless of whether it's (1) or (2), I now feel bad about my initial reaction.)
The New Hampshire thing seems like the most likely way to put an end to this -- could the NH AG manage to subpoena calling records and send out a "fill out this form and win $2500" to everyone on the Do Not Call list that was called? A hundred million dollar judgment against the RCCC or the RNC would certainly send a message to bad actors, not that it would help the Dems who got screwjobbed.
And yes, it's a violation of election laws not to plainly announce who is sponsoring the call at the beginning. No teeth to the rules, sadly.
Brock? Did you listen to the call? Again, someone who hears enough of the call to know it's a political call, and then hangs up, hears the Democrat's name in a neutral context and then gets harassing callbacks (which they probably also hang up on) leaving them thinking that the call is from the Democrat. Someone who listens to the whole thing gets the negative spiel, and no callbacks, so no sense of having been harassed by the Republican.
I'm not sure what FL's thinking, but I'm still very comfortable thinking ill of the NRCC on this basis.
could the NH AG manage to subpoena calling records and send out a "fill out this form and win $2500" to everyone on the Do Not Call list that was called?
She could, if she weren't a Republican.
Has it been firmly established that the people who hang up after hearing only the Dem candidate's name are the ones who get called back? Or is this a theory being pieced together from reports of people being misled/called over and over?
No, LB, of course I didn't listen to the call. I prefer to have my political sentiments flip from one extreme to the other based on informal second-hand reporting. I assumed FL wouldn't be misleading us, so I assumed everything said prior was a serious overreaction. It sounds like perhaps not, in which case I am now indignant once again. And I suppose I now must assume that FL is a republican operative/troll.
This is the corrupting influence of strategy. First basketball players deliberately fouling each other, then this.
Firmly established? I haven't seen a story in the major media, but TPM readers wrote in describing the calls as repeating if you hang up on them, but not otherwise.
It is, of course, possible that this isn't true.
34: FL has a point in that the call isn't very long, and if you sit through the whole thing it's clear that it's negative. I think he just missed the 'repeated calls as a response to hang-ups' part of it.
LB, your 5 says
The deception only operates against someone who doesn't listen to the whole thing.
This is exaggerated. Here's the one recording I've heard, via TPM:
"Hello, I'm calling with some information about John Hall. [very short pause] Liberal John Hall says he'll [?] roll back the recent federal tax cuts..."
You can't make it past "liberal" without knowing that it's an attack call; if you're especially thickheaded, your agnosticism about its valence will wait until "roll back tax cuts." Seriously, to hear people talk about this I expected to be on the edge of my seat until the very end, when the NRCC approved the message.
But seriously, FL, who listens to a robot voice for longer than ten seconds?
who listens to a robot voice for longer than ten seconds?
No one you know, but more people than you'd guess.
Do people who listen to the whole message ever get called back? It seems like some of them probably do -- I've seen posts referring to someone's answering machine that was full of anti-Duckworth messages (answering machines don't generally hang up on you) and some of the news articles seem to imply that people who listened to the whole message have been receiving the calls repeatedly nonetheless.
It's not a very important distinction that I'm after but I think it would prove intent. Are they just hiring a crappy auto-dialing service on the cheap, or are they intentionally implementing an heuristic that targets the people who don't want robocalls?
Be nice to Labs, he's very lonely and sometimes robocalls are all he gets on any given evening. Of course he'll listen until the end.
No one I know voted for Bush in 2004, either.
Labs is right: it's election season, so the Republicans are making annoying Robocalls, and the Democrats are spinning them as annoying and dishonest. It's not the end of the Republic. That happened a few years ago.
Assuming the last sentence of 30 is true (which I don't know for sure, but I now trust Steve more than I trust FL), I think FL's point is unimportant. It's illegal-- can the RNCC really defend itself by saying "well it's not designed to trick people..." At some point you just have to call bullshit.
Also, if the last sentence of 30 is true, I suspect 11 is wrong. Probably been done before -- why else have the law against it. Legislation that is intelligently preemptive is rare.
Not that there's anything less wrong with that.
44- Not the end of the Republic? In what way is this different from a military coup?
6,7,44:Losers and whiners. Winning isn't everything, winning is the only thing. Why aren't Democrats doing this first, harder, meaner? The Republicans just need to get races close enough to steal. 5 pts is about right.
"We played fair, they cheated, and a million Iraqis died. But at least we played fair."
Brock, you [J]anus-faced bastard.
I don't know if the calls violate election law, but I am claiming that the ad we've heard is not clearly deceptive. If you wanted to trick voters, your phone call would sound a lot different.
Fie on your cynicism. I myself was touched that both Bill Clinton and John Edwards cared enough to call.
In case it isn't clear, 6,7, and 44 are the closest to tolerable comments I found in this thread.
I hesitantly agree with mcmanus: if you think the law (existing or potential) will protect either you (or democracy), your perspective is very different from mine.
The thing is, that Democratic campaigns are reporting getting a lot of calls from pissed-off voters asking them to stop the robo-calls. It is possible that this is a coordinated project of deception from the Democratic campaigns -- that really, they aren't getting blamed for the calls. If we take their claims at face value, though, which I'm inclined to, we've got harassing robocalls from the RNCC, voters blaming the Democrats, and a reasonable mechanism for that to happen intentionally -- that someone who listens just long enough to get what the call is about, and then hangs up, hears the Democrat's name in a neutral context.
Now, maybe the Republicans just screwed up, nationally, with the harassing robocalls, and got really, really lucky with how voters happened to consistently misunderstand them. It's possible. I don't see any reason to think it's true, but I'll admit it's possible.
To put it another way, I take issue with this:
If you wanted to trick voters, your phone call would sound a lot different.
When professionals create a series of calls that evidence shows have the effect of deceiving voters in a way that serves the purposes of the people making the calls, I think it's kind of silly to say that it's obvious that the calls couldn't have been made with deceptive intent.
45 - Awesome! Please send me a check for my miracle cure patent medicine. $1200, and a bargain at twice the price!
Except that I'm wrong -- it's not a violation of election law (except possibly on a state-by-state level; it may be illegal in Illinois, I think), but of FCC regulations. "(b) All artificial or prerecorded telephone messages shall: (1) At the beginning of the message, state clearly the identity of the business, individual, or other entity that is responsible for initiating the call."
Nonetheless, it's illegal, but they'll pay their fines and go home smiling unless a state law is used to smash them into the ground.
I am also unconvinced that voters are 'consistently' believing that the robocalls are coming from Democratic candidates. Especially any more consistently than they're believing any of the other wild and absurd misrepresentations that Republican candidates are making about their opponents. Sure, there are anecdotes, but you can also find individual people who really believe that Democrats love terrorists. Whether you can call it a cohesive and successful strategy is another thing entirely.
It is definitely Good for Democrats that as many people as possible hear about this, though, on the national news if possible. So I wholeheartedly support an immediate exposé on these underhanded tactics.
That statute that Steve just dug up goes a long way towards convincing me that the alleged deception would work consistently, though. If the established protocol for robocalls is immediate identification, then you can expect people to assume that the name at the beginning of the message is who the message is from, and that this assumption could override all the countervailing evidence that Labs mentions.
It was pretty exciting back in 2004 when I got my first call from Bill Clinton, and I listened to his whole speech. Now I hang up as soon as I recognize his voice. Stop harrassing me, Bill!
That's it. The Left left me. I urge you all to vote the Republican ticket.
ad we've heard is not clearly deceptive
Not clearly deceptive or clearly not deceptive? The former doesn't get you very far. I think you may be vestly underestimating how easy most people are to deceive, especially when deception is--like here--merely creating a false impression.
Sooner or later I will have to listen to this thing myself, I suppose. Also, I'm hurt that no one laughed at my joke in 8.
Naysayers should ask themselves one question: if the calls don't work, then why is someone paying for them?
I mean, it's not as if the R's don't have plenty of money to hire people who know *exactly* what they're doing.
57: Call in the re-education teams! If we allow a philosopher gap to develop, the Left is lost!
Also: If you wanted to trick voters, your phone call would sound a lot different.
What if you wanted to trick voters while straight-facedly denying that you had anything like that idea in mind, and spinning the accusation as wild Democractic conspiracy theory? Isn't this exactly what your call would sound like?
The genius of the call is that it's got all the benefits of a straightforward attack while at least mitigating the negative effects stemming from irritation at the call itself. I'm not convinced it's meant to be deceptive. I suspect it's either intended or (happily) predicted to produce at least some irritation at the target, via, e.g., the association of "John Hall" and "those damned phone calls."
So all your blathering was basically just some philosophical quibble over the meaning of the word "deceptive"? Bah.
62: Um, what Brock said. If it's calculated to make voters blame the subject of the calls for the calls, how is that not deceptive?
I think FL is saying that the connection is not close enough for there to be actual deception. If I flash pictures of a burning cross and Bush at you, I'm not deceiving you. But who knows what wisdom Abu seeks to impart?
Possibly. There are distinctions between 'deceiving someone' and 'intentionally causing them to form false beliefs' that are obscure to lesser minds among us.
(Heavy handed sarcasm, on the other hand, is available to us all. I'll be cheerful and charming after the election, honest!)
My quiestion is, who on earth would decide who they should vote for because they got a robocall from JOE FUCKIN PISCOPO? He was the least funny member of the least funny cast of SNL in 30 years, and he hasn't accomplished anything since then. He claimed to be a democrat suporting Republican NJ Senate Candidate Tom Kean Jr. and his spiel was perfectly amiable until I hung up. I don't think it was a trick call by the democrats. If Kean loses bigger than expected, Piscopo is the explanation.
Well, I certainly made sure to vote in 2004 after I got a call from Puff Daddy threatening to kill me if I didn't. He didn't tell me who to vote for, though, so I wrote in Harold Stassen.
It sucks not living in swing districts and missing out on all the fun of participatory democracy.
65: Because the actual content of the call makes it clear that it's a Republican call -- but many of voters in those contentious districts (especially the swing voters being targeted by both sides) aren't actually listening to the message, they're just hanging up. It's hard to argue in court that you're deceived by a message you didn't listen to. And I'll bet that for every person who calls the local Democratic campaign to complain, ten are just silently pissed off and have a mental black mark against the Dem, assuming they haven't decided to go GOP or stay out of this one altogether.
Now, now, my erstwhile lefty fellows. My blathering was inspired by actually listening to the ad, expecting to find that it required some sort of Straussian reading to suss out its ties to the NRCC, and finding that it was actually a completely straightforward attack message.
I think the phone call is more like using an unflattering picture of your opponent than like lying about your opponent. It promotes negative associations, but it doesn't require deception to do that.
I suspect it's either intended or (happily) predicted to produce at least some irritation at the target, via, e.g., the association of "John Hall" and "those damned phone calls."
How typically Rovlovian. Dog Whistle politics, indeed.
70: You should see the sad sacks they run against Charlie Rangel. I don't know if there's anyone running as a Republican this year -- I haven't seen any indication of an active candidacy -- but a couple of years ago I walked by this poor sap shaking hands on a streetcorner as a Republican candidate for Congress in Upper Manhattan. He looked so sad that I shook his hand and told him I was a Republican: given that I'm white and boring looking, it's possible, and he clearly needed the emotional boost.
He was the least funny member of the least funny cast of SNL in 30 years, and he hasn't accomplished anything since then.
That's a vast overstatement.
72: Eh, if you don't buy the early-hang-up mechanism, you're right, the calls aren't deceptive.
The re-education squads will be as gentle as possible.
TPM linked somewhere to an editorail whose article suggested paying a robocall cite to spam the NRCC. That'd be pretty funny, if it worked. He supplied both a robocall website, and the NRCC #.
to form false beliefs
This is just the disagreement: the intended effect isn't at the level of belief. Sure, some people form false beliefs, but I think the purpose doesn't require that.
77 should not be construed to mean that I care about how dishonest the republican-strategy-at-issue is. I just think effectively shutting down the RNCC's phonelines for the next 2 days would be teh ROXXORS.
oh man. someone just totally farted in my general direction. eww.
It's interesting to watch where "I'm McX, and I approved of this message" appears in a TV ad-- for the nastier ones, some of the candidate approvals are in the front, so they won't follow on and be tied to all the gloom-n-doom of the ad itself.
74- No one tops Jack E. Robinson, the last sacrificial lamb fed to Ted Kennedy (mmm, mutton!) The guy was in a fucking car accident on live radio because he was giving an interview on his cell phone while driving.
I disagree. At least, I know that as soon as I realize a call is from a robot, I hang up. If I got a robot call that said "Let me talk to you about Phil Angelides," I'd hang up and be annoyed instantly at the robot method of calling. If I then kept getting callbacks, apparently from the same bot, I'd be massively irritated at the California Democratic Party and form untrue prejudices against them to go with the (I believe) true prejudices I already have. I mean, how, in that case, am I not deceived? And do you really think that that isn't a big part of the intent of the calls? We're not talking about whether legally speaking it can be proven; we're talking about a reasonable supposition here.
38 + 82 = Labs thinks bitch is thickheaded.
am I not deceived
hey, it's not my fault you make bad inferences! Much love, B. Anyway, 78's point is that the goal of the call is the association of bad feeling and John Hall; this happens without consciously thinking about who's making the call and it doesn't require beliefs about the call's origins.
I bet Weiner would have a detailed argument about why I'm totally wrong about this, but he's not around, so I might be able to BS my way through this.
hey, it's not my fault you make bad inferences!
This here is the crux. Isn't it?
Distinctions, people, distinctions.
Is the script of the call deceptive? No.
Does the call itself, in context--which means that people are half-listening and likely to hang up very quickly--make it likely that many of those called will form a false impression? Yes.
Was this deception intentional? Most likely.
a false impression
Define the term, so that we can draw distinctions. If I have a vaguely uncomfortable feeling on seeing the Dem pol's face, is that an impression, and can it be false?
Do I agree with Ogged entirely on the above? But of course.
Does this make the NRCC a grotesque and abhorrent pack of cheats? In my opinion, yes.
88: In Ogged's context, I believe he is using 'false impression' to mean 'false belief (although possibly a vague and inchoate one) about who's responsible for the annoying call'.
Which is the reason Republicans are breaking the law and not having the calls begin by announce themselves plainly. They get the upside of attack ads without the downside of annoucing themselves as jerks who interrupt your dinner hour (and the possible delicious Reddi-Whip bonus of calling back over and over again if you keep hanging up when you hear the Dem's name). Dunno what subtle FL-ish nuance I'm missing here, but presumably there was something in Gorgias about putting on a sophist mask and going to bother Callicles over and over when Monday Night Football is on.
Wait, Ogged, *context*? But that's so . . . anti-Platonic.
false belief (although possibly a vague and inchoate one)
Right, but how vague and inchoate can something be before it's not a "belief"? If it's only a negative association, with no specific content that can be recalled, does that qualify?
I ain't no fancy philosophizin' type, and I don't go much for book-larnin', but it seems to me that Labs is being willfully obtuse. Which is itself intellectually dishonest.
In this context (of blaming someone for an irritating even) I don't think you get the negative association at all without a belief. Presumably you could make an effective political ad by rapidly cutting back and forth between a picture of a candidate and a shot of rotting meat seething with maggots, while annoying screechy noises were played. This wouldn't create false beliefs, just negative associations. But here, the negative associations are about the responsibility for the call -- I don't think they come into play unless the listener has a belief about who bears that responsibility.
But that's so . . . anti-Platonic.
Fess up, B, you've never read any Plato.
94: Come on, don't be mean. He's unconvinced that the 'hang-up-early' mechanism would work well enough to deceive any substantial number of voters, and therefore unconvinced that it was intentional. I think he's absolutely wrong, but wrong doesn't mean dishonest.
Actually, I really have read some Plato, in a "History of Literary Criticism" seminar. Truly.
97 is the worst comment that's ever been left on this blog. Including spam.
The part of the outrage here that I really don't 'get' is this belief that so many people are being deceived. Of course some people have been deceived. People believe all kinds of crazy things. What I haven't seen any evidence of is that a significant proportion of the population is being deceived. I'd consider it more likely, as Labs said, that hearing the candidate's name while you experience the annoyance of getting a robo-call is more damaging than the "false flag" aspect. Are we really assuming that half the people receiving this call are slamming down the receiver in the half-second between hearing the Democrat's name and hearing that s/he's a dirty wicked liberal?
And then on the other hand, I can't get myself too worked up about this level of deception. All this is going on while they're openly saying that the Democrats want to raise your taxes to give health care to gay terrorists. I think the overt deception is more of a problem than the subtextual quasi-deception.
I even used the word "eidos" in my dissertation! Nyah!
Anyway, 78's point is that the goal of the call is the association of bad feeling and John Hall; this happens without consciously thinking about who's making the call and it doesn't require beliefs about the call's origins.
No...are you saying that the voter doesn't come away from the robocall with a belief about its origin?
What you're saying is true of your basic negative campaign TV/radio ad. ("Liberal candidate Fontana Labs blah blah blah ACLU blah voted to raise taxes X number of times blah blah blah illegal immigrants blah blah blah blame America first blah blah blah wrong for this district, wrong for America. This message has been brought to you by nobody at all, certainly not Fontana Labs's opponent, and is not intended to endorse a candidate.")
This robocall thing RELIES on giving people a false belief of the origin of the calls. And it gives people the impression that the Democrats are generating the robocalls, and are inept and untrustworthy enough to bother people with 6 or 8 robocalls in the middle of the night or at dinner time.
100: Really? If party X is trying to manipulate election results, it doesn't matter much unless you can prove they succeeded? That seems an awfully complacent point of view.
103: I have never ever claimed to be a philosopher, nor would I want to.
I love the attempted even-handedness of "party X" in 104. It's the day before elections B-- time for the masks to come off!
Of course some people have been deceived. People believe all kinds of crazy things. What I haven't seen any evidence of is that a significant proportion of the population is being deceived.
I can't tell you what percentage of the population was deceived by these calls over the past week, because the grant for my research project hasn't been approved yet. However, people are being deceived, as described in numerous Talking Points Memo posts, this being the most infuriating.
106: No, honestly, I was thinking about it in an abstract sense.
I think you misunderstood my point. What we have here is a possible case of deception. Big whoopty doo. We have a whole shitload of real live cases of deception, some about the campaign, many about the way the government is being run.
I think it's more of a problem if people are going into the voting booth after being deceived about the issues and the candidates than after being deceived about the source of a last-minute campaign call. At least, I haven't seen anyone try to argue how the last one is fundamentally different.
We have anecdotes about people who won't vote for Tammy Duckworth because they think she's calling them over and over. Fine. What about the people who won't vote for Duckworth because they think Democrats will turn the schools into homosexuality indoctrination centers?
I should repeat that I think this is a great story for the Democrats to ride through tonight's news cycle and I'd be tickled pink if it's the lead story on the nightly news. It'd be informative and bad for the Republicans. But I don't think this represent a previously unexplored level of lies and deception.
I insist that my obtuseness is well-intentioned.
I really have read some Plato, in a "History of Literary Criticism" seminar.
This is the saddest thing I've ever heard.
This robocall thing RELIES on giving people a false belief of the origin of the calls. And it gives people the impression that the Democrats are generating the robocalls, and are inept and untrustworthy enough to bother people with 6 or 8 robocalls in the middle of the night or at dinner time.
I'm not sure that's right. If the Reds somehow managed to give me a little electric shock every time I heard the word "Democrat," I might have negative associations with the word absent any specific belief about the origins of the shock. Or maybe not. (There's your grant proposal for you.)
109- The opponents of the homosexuality indoctrination party weren't going to vote for Duckworth in the first place. We're talking about marginal voters. There are people out there who hate Congress and therefore will vote Republican because they think the Democrats control Congrss, but they're beyond hope.
The main effect of the calls is on people who are not firmly committed to a candidate and who therefore would let their annoyance at having dinner interrupted change their vote. How many of these are there? 2% of the elctorate? 1%? Enough to make a difference in some races.
113: I think it's pretty close. If you keep getting robo-calls that interrupt you, and all you hear before you hang up is "Democrats," it amounts to the same thing, I think.
115: Except that in this context, you can't help but form an opinion about who's shocking you -- you know it's either the Ds or the Rs. It seems unlikely that the non-belief-related negative associations could be strong enough to override the belief-based blaming.
114 has it exactly right.
And that makes me think that this Happy Dude scam is the absolute scam of last resort. The nuclear option, if you will. If this sways the election, the media is going to cover it soon thereafter. And people who said on November 4th "I was going to vote for John Hall, and so were all my friends, but not after we got all those robocalls." are not going to be happy that they were manipulated in this way.
IF this sways the election, I think there will be actual scandal about it. Our press is free enough, and contains enough liberals, not to sanction anything that shameless. I predict that the Republicans win the House by 5 seats; it is found that the autodialing harassment probably turned the tide in 10 elections; and 2 Republicans agree to fall on their sword and magnanimously step down.
IF this sways the election, I think there will be actual scandal about it. Our press is free enough, and contains enough liberals, not to sanction anything that shameless.
Wouldn't it be nicer if there were scandal BEFORE it had a chance to sway the election? I don't see why you think that if it doesn't seem shameless enough to talk about now that anyone will lay the blame for election results at its feet later.
The smarmy use of robocalls has been going on since 2002 at least, to my personal knowledge. In 2002, I helped a candidate running against Tom Delay (yes, it was tilting at windmills then) and at the same time TPM reported the disruption of phones in New Hampshire, 2 things happened to the dem candidate in Texas: 1) His phone lines got physically cut, and 2) when they were restored, there were waves of robocalls *into* the phone lines disrupting ability to make any calls (including robocalls) out-- the instant a line was open, a robocall would be there tying it up. These were not coincidence, and were so close to the events in NH (and so tied to national republicans) that I thought what was going on was obvious.
One really, serious problem has been getting national coverage of these issues. The work is just too hard for reporters to do unless some interest group hands them the story 8 or 9 tenths done. And even then, it may go nowhere, the way the Deiblold stories have effectively gone.
I've been hoping that Joshua Micah Marshall's dilligent piecing-together-of-the-story may eventually lead to national media coverage of just how the dirty tricks operations work.
I honestly think from having seen the inside of some campaigns that the democrats don't use these methods. I've seen no sign of it. OTOH, I worry about whether they've effectively updated their GOTV operations to meet the computer era. In 2002 I was involved in efforts to get that going and was disgusted at dealings with the DCCC. In 2004, something went horridly wrong in Ohio-- maybe the GOTV operation, maybe something more sinister, though it seems likely both.
Wouldn't it be nicer if there were scandal BEFORE it had a chance to sway the election?
Yes, that would be nicer.
I don't see why you think that if it doesn't seem shameless enough to talk about now that anyone will lay the blame for election results at its feet later.
The liberals in the press don't know what to do about this. They don't want to be accused of trying to sway the election. They want to know the full extent of the problem first.
I find 114 to be unresponsive to my question. How is this trick dirtier than the outright lies? Because it targets marginal voters? That's not new, political campaigns always target marginal voters with their dirty attacks. (And tying the opponent to homosexuality is actually a quite good method to target marginal voters too, since disliking gay people crosses party lines.) So it's a lie that fools some small percentage of the people who hear it. This is different than the other lies in what way?
"and 2 Republicans agree to fall on their sword and magnanimously step down."
Is that before or after Chancellor Choco-Taco descends from Mount Lollipop with his delicious candy decree, and we begin the seven month Feast of Falling Sweets?
My 2c on the calls:
I've listened to the call online too, like Labs. And you'd have to hang up pretty damn fast to be decieved BUT most people (me included) hang up on robocalls pretty damn fast. So I believe the widespread anecdotal evidence that the calls are hurting democratic candidates all over the place.
How is this trick dirtier than the outright lies? Because it targets marginal voters?
Yes. It targets, two days before the election, people who were likely to vote Democratic but may not now, and it does so by deceiving them (the precise nature of the deception is left as an exercise for the philosophers). It could well swing one or more of these elections. Maybe other deceptions have been worse, but this is the one that's going on right now, as we speak, so this is the one we need to concentrate on.
on a slightly related note: here in NM CD-1 the sworn statements are alleging that the republicans have been calling dems and greens and telling 'em to go to the wrong polling place. see:
http://www.dukecityfix.com/index.php?itemid=2244#c
122: What I mean is that the Republicans will ensure that they keep their majority.
124: It seems that what you're saying applies to the content of the calls just as much as the supposed misinterpretation of them.
127: Yes, but the misinterpretation is the part that's working.
Is it, though? I haven't really seen any evidence about how effective it is, especially compared to other attacks.
But it should go without saying that Democrats are much more comfortable talking about the misinterpretation than the other attacks, because they don't want to broadcast the latter, but talking about the former only benefits them (Republicans are calling you over and over! During dinner!).
Check out the link in 107. There seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence, at least, that the calls are having an effect.
I even used the word "eidos" in my dissertation!
But which interpretation of "eidos" did you go with? You might as well not bring something up, if you're going to be so vague about it.
hey, it's not my fault you make bad inferences!
this would make a great t-shirt.
I get to be vague, I'm a literary scholar. Anyway, the abstract of my diss is googleable.
I can't wait for the seven month Feast of Falling Sweets!
"It is a funy thing tho your side always gets beaten whichever skool you are at. That is like life i supose. Chiz."
Huh, so it isn't, only the title. What the hell? I guess I should do something like create a web page or some such, huh?
