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.

Add a comment