Yesterday, I emailed both of my senators about the economic crisis and also the Whitehouse about how I felt about Tom Daschle being hounded out of office due to (in my view, as I wrote) the ambiguity and complexity of our tax laws. I often email my governmental representatives and have for a long time.
But today I emailed my senators about a topic that has bugged me for a long time: constituent spam.
This stuff is to legitimate contacts of representatives by constituents exactly as spam, junk mail, and robo-calling is to legitimate email, surface mail, and real phone calls. My advice to my senators was that once a certain threshold above the normal rate of call-in or email activity has been reached, the counts should simply be ignored, the same as you would ignore spam in your inbox.
We all know what happens: members of some group, church, or audience are given a rally, a pep-talk, a form letter or sheet of talking points on some hot-button topic, and exhorted to call their congressman or senators or the whitehouse. Suddenly, the counts of incoming calls peak, the delay time increases for calls, and we all read about how calls are running 100-to-1 against some progressive issue or other. However, those numbers are certainly inflated due to multiple calls, and do not predict election results in any case, since they emanate from a small minority within the constituency. Yet, they consistently shape the debate, affect policy, and divert energy from progressive issues.
I think it's time to go meta. Why not contact your senators and representative and give them that advice: that when an unusually large number of constituents contact them on a given issue, they should ignore the spread and simply take it, overall, as indicating that some well-organized groups are spinning up their members.
Now, constituent spam is definitly generated across the entire political spectum, including the recent spate of diaries here. However, I think it is clear that it is done way more often and far more successfully by the Right. I've basically decided that not only is it unlikely that the efforts of the wingers can be surpassed by those on the Left, but also that I don't want them to be. I don't want to be a spammer, a freeper, or a dittohead wannabe.
I think the correct approach, instead, it to characterize the spam arriving in Washington as what it is, and to let our representatives know that we expect them to be able to tell genuine constituent concerns from these junk-call frenzies.
Just my opinion.
Greg Shenaut