Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Hill Shill Page Gardner Serially Inept

If you like truly bizarre statements that somehow manage to completely miss the truth of a matter you really need to go read Page Gardner's "apology" for being an idiot over at HuffPo, Confusion...Robo-calls. What the supposed deal is that they inadvertently robo-called voters in North Carolina telling them they would receive a registration packet that needed to be returned in order to be registered - well after the cut-off date in North Carolina. These calls seemed to hit African Americans particularly and included many registered voters. This organization is called Women Voices Women Votes.

Such a dropped ball could occur on an occasion, one has to wonder how it has happened in 11 different states. One has to wonder how political pros could get it so wrong, so many times. Political pros? The Institute for Southern Studies has a pretty definitive run down of this. Page Gardner, Maggie Williams (yes Clinton's manager), John Podesta, and Joe Goode are amongst the incompetents who managed to mess this up so spectacularly eleven times. A commenter alleges that they had $4.3 million in direct public contributions so there would not be an excuse about shoe string budgets that frequently afflict registration drives.

Oddly, these difficulties with dates don't seem to have bothered this organization enough to mark them down on a calendar. It might be important to register voters before the cut-off date if one were into that sort of thing. Secretaries of State have web sites with all this sort of information easily available and clearly indicated; because Secretaries of State think it is important. If one were attempting to increase voter participation getting people registered in time would accomplish that end. Speaking to unregistered women would as their target audience would reach that group. They did not get registration dates right and reached quite a few registered voters and male registered voters and confused them. Not registered them, confused them, repeatedly in separate states. Leading people to believe that they are not registered dissuades them from voting, not increases participation.

I'm not going to cut and paste other people's work here, I've given you two sources, including the offender and other links are available both on Southern Studies and Google. I want to be clear, that as one who has pounded the pavement to increase voter registration, I find this kind of behavior most offensive. The robo-calls in North Carolina appear to be felonious in nature and felonious in subject - the providing of inaccurate election information. The intent is not probably provable outside circumstantial without a direct testimony of a principle. Circumstantial evidence would certainly not seem to be on the side of ineptitude or incompetence with it's repeated occurrence. The presence of so many Clinton contributors and previous employees makes assertions of incompetence even more difficult to believe as a causation.

Hillary Clinton has stated that she's having fun now that the 'kitchen sink' approach is out there. We've seen that sink before, it was called Swiftboating and in Florida it was Bush campaign honcho K Harris gutting voter roles with faux felony accusations to depress African American turnout. I don't care if there is a (D) or (R) after the name of someone who engages in this kind of behavior, they are scum. They interfere with one of the most basic values of our country and I cannot sit still for it.

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