Finally, a Use for Constituent E-mail
10:30 PM Sep 10, 2006
Ned Lamont is the gift that keeps on giving for political bloggers, and who are we at Half-Poets to sniff at the bounty?
There's a tussle
between assorted bloggor/media segments about whether Lamont's recent
diss of Joe Lieberman's Lewinsky-era public prig act did or did not
contradict a letter he wrote Lieberman at the time. We'll let Teagan and Matt sort that issue out.
More of interest here is the appearance (as LamontBlog
points out) that Joe's campaign made use of a constituent message to
Joe's Senatorial office. Ned's letter, with its cc to
sen_dodd@dodd.senate.gov, harks charmingly back to the brief period
when Congress members had public e-mail addresses. (And when they
handled constituent e-mail using a printer. Shockingly, that solution didn't scale too well.)
Matters have regressed since then, as we've discussed at length
in this space. A decade on from those innocent times, members duck from
e-mail behind web forms and indiscriminate "spamming" accusations
against advocates who use third-party write-your-rep pages.
The
dynamic is a maddening indicator not only of cluelessness but of the
power of incumbency, inasmuch as membes in their resolution to avoid,
screen and disregard constituent messages voluntarily relinquish the
invaluable data their constituents are attempting to provide them --
not least of which is their contact data. Only a body utterly secure in
its repose could so contemptuously squander such a trove.
While
a Chinese wall is supposed to divide the a member's office from his or
her campaign office, the spectacle of reps turning aside constituent
e-mail addresses in the former capacity while paying through the nose
to build spam-like lists in the latter can't fail to bemuse. The fact
is that members have been using franking privileges to tap-dance around
that regulation in the snail mail for ages; it doesn't seem so hard to
imagine that taking up a proffered e-mail dialogue might weigh just as
heavy at the polls.
Now, Joe2006 may be touched with a special strain of technological maladroitness.
But if indeed this message was leaked by the Lieberman Hill staff in
support of the Lieberman campaign staff, we have a crowning indignity:
electronic communiques scorned as a potential community of support ...
but welcomed as an ammunition depot against any inconvenient political
ambitions entertained by their authors.
Now this is a use of technology that Congress might be able to get behind.
*
Since every Congressional office runs its own IT fief, the portrait
here is necessarily an amalgam of trends rather than an indictment of
every -- or any -- individual's particular shop.
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