I received a robocall telling me to caucus on SUNDAY 2/10 for Obama

[Zgrrl]

This is weird...I just received a robocall on my answering machine telling me to remember to caucus for Barack Obama on Sunday, February 10th. The caucuses are of course on Saturday the 9th. I called the Obama campaign, and the guy I spoke with said the campaign is aware of these calls and they are "kind of freaking out" about them. Has anyone else gotten such a call?

[SeattleGirl]

1. I haven't but damn!

The Pubbies are at it again. :grr:

[eridani]

2. Let's hope it was Pubbies. I really don't like thinking about the alternative n/t

[eridani]

3. A comment from one of my listservs--

This is pretty sneaky. I have done overt phone operations , utilized robo calls in campaigns, and even ran a 15 person political phone bank business that failed miserably. From my experience, and knowledge of tactics from both parties, I would predict this to have the signature of a conservative 3rd party business interest, mostly to stir anger between Democrats. I doubt any of the candidates even know about the origins. These Business interests have all sorts of operations going that nobody knows about and they do not have any ethical boundaries for these operations other than divide and conquer.

If someone can record a call and get it to me, I may be able to get some attention on it, although the phone number is likely untraceable without a court order for phone company records. One could set up 50 Vonage Accounts for cheap, make robo calls for 4 weeks through it all with false information, then close the accounts down and disappear. Nobody could trace the calls without major investigations. The operation could contact hundreds of thousands if not millions of phone number in a fairly short period of time for around $10,000 - $20,000.

A third party business interest could afford to take the hit for getting caught while neither of the candidates could survive something like that. The initial way to resist the influence of this shit is to avoid getting angry at one of the candidates or assuming they were involved. If you get angry at someone about the calls, then the calls probably had their intended effect.



Shapeshifter E
ezra {at} olypen.com

[rhett o rick]

5. I particularly like your last paragraph. I use that rule. If I feel like reacting then I suspect

those that want me to react. Of course it is possible to do the reverse but I doubt most people are subtle enough for that.

[eridani]

4. Looks like it was a goof by the Obama campaign

Seems to be some kind of official statement.

This turned out to be a snafu created by the vendor hired by the Obama campaign. They sent Maine's calls (they have a Sunday caucus) to WA -- or some such. The vendor's sending out correction calls, according to SLOG.

[countryjake]

6. Right. It was on Friday's local news that the mistake was a national campaign one...

I had originally figured it for some sort of rethug stunt, but now they're reporting that the calls came from Obama's national campaign office.

Talk about dumb, disorganized, and detrimental...jeez.


Up here in our area, the rethugs were going very heavy with the robo-calls this week. One guy at our caucus told me that he'd received three of them, just this morning, and we got a Huckabee one on Thurs. Such calls are extremely impersonal and downright insulting to the average person.