It is not true that in this country the voting population carries all the power. It is not a shadow government, it is not Congress, it is not forces of conspiracy against the people. The single most powerful group of people in the United States today are the canvassers for political figures.
You’re sitting at dinner with the family, minding your own business. The telephone rings, and you, in a moment of absent-minded foolishness, answer it. On the line comes an anonymous voice, the voice of someone far away from you who thinks they’re doing something fantastic for their country; “Hello, Mr. Johnson? I’m with the McCain campaign and I was wondering if I could ask you some questions…” Your wife gets up to answer a knock at the door and over the ramblings of foreign policy views in your ear, you hear: “Hello, Mrs. Johnson, I’m with Huckabee for President… I’d just like to ask you about some issues in America that concern you…”
This practice is a form of citizen advertising called “canvassing”. This refers to the bombardment of registered voters with what seems to be a pleasant conversation but is poorly disguised within actively pushing and promoting a product– namely, the candidate. The idea is that the canvassers fish for a problem you see that needs to be fixed– just like a salesman– and offers their product up for sale. The idea is that you’ll think to yourself “jeez, this candidate’s a great guy! (or gal) and your vote will change based on that. Just like making a sale, except with ballot checkmarks instead of dollar signs reflected in the eyes of the canvasser.
I decided to expose how this sordid and annoying activity takes place due to my own personal experience canvassing (as a favor for a friend) for a presidential candidate in August and September whom I have chosen not to name due to his contrast with my own views and his dropout immediately after the Iowa caucus.
My duties included telephone calls, door-to-door, and campaign literature mailings. For a few hours a day, I would sit at a laptop computer with a phone next to me. I would use what’s called the “Voter Activation Network”, or simply VAN, a draconian database of all the registered voters of any party in any voting precinct. It included their adresses, telephone numbers, age, people they lived with (so you could sell to them if the other party wasn’t present) and a list of the elections in the past they voted in. With all this information at hand, you could pick people to call and target them based on these demographics with information on the candidate, not unlike television advertisers. For example, if I was calling an old lady, I made sure to speak clearly and talk about medicare or the economy in my “pitch.” If I was calling a middle-aged individual, the hot buttons were economy, the war in Iraq, universal health care, and environmental issues.
However, those were just the ones that I spoke to. Out of the hundreds of calls I made, only about thirty people actually talked to me about the candidates issues. Many of them simply hung up when I told them I was with a campaign, and some of them argued with me about the candidate’s views. Door to door was not much different. People who speak with you warmly and greet you cheerfully at first will give you an icy stare when you mention you’re from a campaign. Nobody seems to want to talk politics. Who can blame them when the media and canvassers are so aggressively pushing opinions on them?
What I took away from my time as a political activist and canvasser is a view from the inside. A chance to be the person on the other end of the line that is interrupting your dinner. It’s made me realize how not only the people who are responsible for the calling are at fault, but the disinterest in the public pushes political “advertisers” to new lows by using things like the VAN. The door-to-door campaigns of yesteryear are remnants of a different time– a time when people felt that they had a voice in government– or cared enough to sue the one they know they have. With a new dispirited and disinterested population, advertisments are the only thing the people understand.
What a sad state politics is in, isn’t it?
