First off - this is my first Diary here on Daily KOS. What prompted me to write is the call I just received.
I just got off the phone with a full-blown bona-fide push-poller. My first experience with this tactic....
For those of you who have never "enjoyed" this kind of telephone survey, it starts out like any telephone poll, and then goes negative in stages. The goal is, of course, not to survey or elicit opinions, but to use the conversation to convey certain negative messages about a candidate or issue.
The twist in this one was that it was clearly Democratic in orientation. The quotations and opinions the "surveyer" was asking my opinion on were about John Doolittle, his voting record, his connections with Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Oil Companies, etc...I will say that the questions were fair (in my opinion), but VERY negative and they got stronger as the conversation went. Were I a Doolittle sympathizer, I would have been offended.
Early in the conversation, she asked me who I was voting for in this race (Doolittle v. Charlie Brown). After the questions were through, she made a point asking the question again; words to the effect of "after everything you've just heard, who do you plan to vote for on Nov. 7?"
Now I have spent time in other BLOGs railing against push-polling as a typical Rovian tactic.....appear scientific, lull the caller into complacency, slander the democrat, end the call as if it were a real poll...John McCain was a victim of such tactics, as was John Kerry and many many other Democratic Candidates. It seemed shameless to me.
But while I am happy to see Democrats taking the bull by the horn, so to speak, I am very ambivalent about using tactics like this to get elected. Keep in mind that the race here in CA04 is hotly contested, and Doolittle is a slimebag of monumental proportion.... I want him gone more than anyone...So why did I feel like I had to take a shower after I hung up the call?
I guess I see Democrats as being idealistic at the core. We talk about creating a better world, we rail against injustice and oppression, and we advocate open and fair dialogue and the free expression of all ideas....So to be on the receiving end of a Democratic implementation of a Rovian tactic creates this cognitive dissonance I am having trouble working through.
Note - it crossed my mind during and after the call that this is a Republican operative push polling so that Doolittle can express outrage at the lengths that the Brown campaign would go to in order to defeat him....it seems plausible, and I'm sort of hoping that's the case. I will call the Brown Campaign in the morning and see what they say.