Sunday, November 5th, 2006...7:25 am
Psst, Hey Randy, Call Me
Last minute “push polls” and negative calls are going on in districts all over the country. My number is not listed on my voter registration, which means I miss out on the fun ones here and have to depend on my vast network of operatives to tell me about them.
I read about one particularly ironic one in Indiana, where the RNC has funded calls on behalf of Rep. Mark Souder. The call is a standard issue “my opponent is soft of those illegals” message:
The United States now is home to 11 million illegal immigrants, and the number grows every year. But instead of protecting our borders, congressional candidate Tom Hayhurst supports citizenship opportunities for illegal aliens.
Here’s where this becomes funny: in Indiana, automated calls, or “Robo Calls,” are illegal. So, how does one keep the costs down?
You farm it out to a foreign call center, of course. Souder is angry because he feels the anti-immigration message is watered down when delivered by people with thick, foreign accents. Hey, if we don’t hire the foreigners over there, we will have to hire them here.
Robo Calls are legal here, and Randy Graf has taken some last minute advantage of that with an interesting twist. Callers hear a littany of reasons why if Gabrielle Giffords gets elected, this entire nation will become some sort of Marxist paradise and citizens will be forced to eat undercooked artichokes and listen to Death Cab for Cutie (my paraphrase may be inaccurate, I didn’t get a call myself). After listening to the allegations, the recipient is given the option to join in on a conference call featuring Graf.
One friend of mine listened and it sounded like a real conference call, with one Republican activist asking how to handle mail-in ballots. My friend was even given the option of asking a question. She asked why Graf is lying about the “sweetheart land deal” in his ads. They hung up on her.
Many Democrats have gotten this call, including Giffords herself. Either the Graf campaign is wasting its money on calling people that will not ever vote for them, or this is some goofy strategy that I don’t get.
I am also trying to figure out if the conference is real. I find it hard to believe that Graf would sit around four days before the election and do a conference call with random voters. Heck, maybe he would, nothing else seems to be working for him.
10 Comments
November 5th, 2006 at 9:35 am
Death Cab For Cutie? Ew!
November 5th, 2006 at 11:15 am
What’s your #? We’ll call you.
November 5th, 2006 at 11:46 am
elizabeth rogers,
What does that mean?
November 5th, 2006 at 11:55 am
If Ted wants on the next Town Hall Conference Call, he has to have a # where we can call him.
November 5th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Call him at 1-800-968-9474.
Vetdem, I am not a fan of the current crop of young rockers. That is all.
November 5th, 2006 at 8:42 pm
You’re info is WAY off. In the telephone town halls that Randy has done, he has allowed anyone to ask questions, even Dems. He has answered questions about Giffords’ sweet land deal from a few callers, who were upset at the ad based upon the sloppy reporting in the Star and Citizen. Anyone who can read will be able to see that everything in Randy’s ads are accurate. And Randy has even said that he is not suggesting that Giffords did anything illegal. The problem is probably more with the City of Tucson than the Giffords family. I mean, hey, why not screw over the city if they ask you to do it? But her defense of the whole thing has been hilarious. “I didn’t run that business.” I know that none of you are that dumb to just believe her. And when she actually asked the Sec. of State’s office to remove her from the Articles of Incorporation, it was because she was accidentally put on the business even though her father’s health was too bad to do anything? I smell B.S. Why can’t she just say: “Those idiots at the City offered to clean up our environmental mess and pay my family and me $13 million plus at the same time! What do you think that I was going to say?” “No. We want to pay for this, and we like not making millions of dollars tax-free off this property.”
But back to the telephone town halls, they are a very effective way to talk with voters on the last days. Instead of robo-calls, you get a live interview where callers can ask real questions almost like talk-radio style with Randy Graf. He has answered hundreds of questions on dozens of subjects from voters in the last few days in these town halls.
You actually kind of sound a little bit jealous that Gabby didn’t think of it first or is too scared to actually explain her positions on the issues with voters, kind of like how she never actually answered the question during the debates. Don’t get your hopes up. That’s not likely to change anytime soon. I mean how could she actually answer the question: “So Gabby why is it that you voted to allow convicted child molesters to live next to schools but voted against allowing Boy Scouts to hold troop meetings in schools?”
November 6th, 2006 at 5:38 am
206 -
Yeah, you got me. I am so jealous that Graf has run a brilliant campaign and I wish that the Giffords campaign was nearly as nimble.
If they were as good as the Graf campaign, just think about it, they’d be somewhere around 37% too!
Tedski
November 6th, 2006 at 8:31 am
Randy Graf’s campaign started and stopped with his extremist, hardball, view of Republican politics through and through. His biggest problem is that everyone knew that and he could only attract predominantly religious and border conservatives.
He did a masterful job at attracting a loyal and extreme base of republicans that wins you a primary, but he was not able to shed that image for the general…and expand his base of support (like Giffords was able).
Randy’s campaign should have been working hard for the middle. He faced the difficult task of getting “normal” republicans to vote for him after that tough primary with Huffman and Hellon. While he was campaigning he found that he could not attract moderates, independents and the cross-over democrats that voted for Kolbe. In fact, his base of support did everything it could to label this type of person as somehow bad for the party.
This will be just part of the story of Randy Graf’s loss tomorrow. A loss in a majority republican drawn district. The bottom line is that some of you Republicans and Graf supporters have made your tent quite quite small. Even if Randy gets closer in this election with tomorrow’s final poll, the rest of the party will be looking hard at their candidates for the future…and the Graf supporters will be left saying that it was “just” one of those years.
I can also tell quite a good tale about why Gabrielle Giffords ran a masterful campaign. I will wait until tomorrow for that.
November 6th, 2006 at 9:29 am
I got the phone call from Randy Graf yesterday inviting me to participate in a “conference call.” Well, I went for it, of course, but I didn’t last long enough to get to ask a question. When I tuned in, Randy was talking to “Hildegard” who sounded like an elderly lady. Hildegard was gushing about how wonderful Randy is, she is a lifelong Republican, she supports him 100%, and she wants to work in his office after he gets elected. Also, Hildegard said that she felt it was her civic duty to get 10 people to vote for Randy and everyone should do this.
I couldn’t tell if this was live or recorded, but I suspect it was recorded given how pro-Randy it was.
November 6th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
Talking about scummy tactics–
This past week, Al Melvin’s campaign [state senate, LD 26] sent out 4 or 5 mailers which not only included misrepresentations and out-and-out lies of Pesquiera and her issue stances, they also included misrepresentations of Melvin’s OWN ISSUE STANCES. One hit piece was on education and didn’t once mention that Melvin supports voucherizing the entire K-12 education system–he tried to give the appearance that he moderate re education–WHEREAS during the forums, whenever he was asked about the issue of education–all he talked about was vouchers and competition and how they worked “every time”. [NOTE: I have no problem with public education money supporting
PUBLIC charter schools and injecting competition into the public school system.]
This shows me that Melvin has very little integrity/honesty.
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