Check out the latest innovation from your friends in the winning-is-better-than-actual-democracy National Republican Congressional Committee. The way it works is this: The NRCC is funding automated “robo calls” to voters in key Congressional districts where the Democratic and Republican candidates are running neck-and-neck. So far no big deal. But the calls actually begin with a line like, “Here is important information about [insert name of Democratic candidate].” If the recipient listens to the whole call, they get a misleading smear against that candidate. But if the recipient hangs up before the message is finished, the call is automatically repeated up to 5 or 6 times in quick succession, making sure that the recipient gets well and truly pissed — at the Democratic candidate, who the recipient assumes is the one behind the annoying calls.

See Joshua Marshall’s Talking Points Memo for the emerging details:

• More GOP dirty phone tricks in New Hampshire…
• The news out of New Hampshire…
• More on what we’re hearing about GOP dirty phone tricks in the New York 19th Congressional District.
• We’re getting reports from a number of congressional districts…
• A number of readers have written in to ask…

It’s a win-win scenario for the people paying for the calls. See, the downside of robo calls (and of phone canvassing generally, but robo calls in particular) is their potential to annoy the recipient. But this way, the folks at the NRCC can have their cake and eat it too. If the recipient listens to the whole thing, they get a misleading attack ad. And if they get annoyed at the message, the misleading nature of the message makes it so the bad karma accrues to the Democratic candidate, not the Republican. And the repeat-calls-in-response-to-hangups technique serves to maximize the annoyance factor.

It’s fiendishly clever. And misleading, and evil, and anti-democracy. That is to say, it’s just the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from today’s Republican Party.

This entry was posted by jbc on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 5:45 pm and is filed under the_usa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.