Dr. DigiPol

Thomas Shapley replied to my letter. His comments and my subsequent responses are presented below. In my opinion, not only does he not get it, but he is hostile to even trying to get it. Oh well….

Thanks for your comments to my letter. I have added my responses, in turn below:

1. Why change a letter that is crafted well to deliver the message?
Because you didn’t write it, and therefore shouldn’t represent it as such.

AR: If I wrote an article and gave you permission to publish it under your name without attribution, that is both my right as the author and, thus your right as granted by the author. These letters are the same. The advocacy groups grant license to activists to use the letters verbatim.

2. Not automated but “facilitated”?
Give me a break.

AR: When Congressional staff indicate that they believe these form email campaigns are fake, they suggest that the emails are automatically generated from a list of constituents without the constituents’ involvement. This is automated. When advocacy groups provide a letter to activists that they can forward (as is, or edited), the activists makes a conscious decision to send the email. That is facilitated. I see this as a very real distinction.

3. “They are from REAL citizens.”
Then let the real citizens write and send them.
They are also from special interest groups trying to peddle influence.

AR: First, almost all of these form emails are editable by activist, if they choose to do so. That decision is theirs, not yours. Second, when a corporation hires a lobbyist to wine and dine Congress to get a legislation passed that helps them make more profit, that is influence peddling. When an advocacy group mobilizes thousands upon thousand of citizen activists to contact Congress, that is an attempt to offset the influence of money with the influence of real citizens expressing real concerns about policy. Which do you think is more democratic?

4. Let’s skip the First Amendment outcry, OK. No one’s being denied the right to communicate with their elected representative, only being asked to confirm that they hold these views.

AR: The issue is not having communication blocked, but chilling it. The Supreme Court has ruled often that actions that chill free speech is a violation of the 1st Amendment. When Congress requires constituents to solve math equations in order to communicate with them, that is chilling to many.

5. “Now, many Congressional staffers defending the logic puzzle will claim that for every form email campaign they receive, at least one or two constituents will complain when they get the message back, saying they never sent the original message.”
Wow, I never even though of that. Groups could use their mailing lists to send comments allegedly from constituents. If citizens are saying, ” hold on, I didn’t send you any message,” it suggest that some fraud is going on.

AR: Are you deliberately trying to ignore my point? If you look at how many emails are currently flowing into Congress on this issue, you will find that real citizens are concerned that their email are being ignored. It takes a lot more than a couple of complaints out of a sample of thousands to indicate fraud.

6. “Remember, whether people send their email via the Congressional website or through the advocacy group’s email form (often provided by Capwiz, GetActive, Democracy in Action, Convio, or Kintera) they must enter a physical address in the Member’s jurisdiction. This is a clear indicator that these emails are real constituent communications and not SPAM.”
Reference the fraud issue above; it’s not hard to have a list of addresses within a district.

AR: And your point is that if it is possible it must be happening? Where is your evidence of fraud? Where is your investigative research that demonstrates actual cases of such fraud? No one has been able to provide such evidence, yet. Do you have it?

7. The vested interests of these groups, which come from all political perspectives, is to give a stronger voice to concerned citizens by aggregating them. This is the hallmark of American democracy. Yet you characterize it as some baneful evil.
Nonsense. I say no such thing.

AR: You call it “influence peddling.” Maybe you don’t call it evil, but you certainly don’t recognize it as the foundation of real democracy.

8. “Impedes” is an overstatement by half. What comes after 7,8,9?

9. “I reiterated this message recently in an email to Senator George Allen. I was concerned that he never responded to any of my emails, regardless of their personalization. The response from his office was quick and overwhelming. I received a long email addressing my issue concerns and a phone message asking me to call them and reconcile the 3 email addresses I had attached to my street address… as if this was the reason they had never written back to me. Truth be told, I have more than 3 email addresses and use them all. There was nothing preventing them from replying to any of my emails using the address I used to send the message in the first place. But they didn’t.”
To what do you attribute their sudden change of heart and decision to respond? What changed?

10. “To me, the message I am getting is that Congressional staff are so desperate to lighten their workload (understandably) that they will ignore a constituent in the process.This is very bad for democracy.”
On this, we agree completely. So why not quit stuffing their email boxes with this, pardon the expression, gang-bang, group think?

11. “In the final analysis, to characterize what I do when I communicate with my elected representatives as “the chaff of ditto-clicks” is an insult to my commitment to the issues that matter to me and an insidious threat to the principles of representative democracy.”
The insult is self-inflicted if you need someone else to write your thoughts for you.
“Insidious threat to the principles of representative democracy” is a merely flight of hyperbolic fancy.

AR: Hmmm… the President has a speechwriter. Members of Congress have speechwriters. Corporate CEO have speechwriters. Are they “ditto-clicks” because someone else writes their thoughts for them. Most of President Bush’s most famous phrases were written by his speechwriter. Why is it ok for him, but not for us?

12. Finally, you keep dragging the issue back to the very practice of using email to communicate. That is not the issue. The medium is not in question. The medium is not relevant to what I’m criticizing. I don’t care if it’s emails or pre-printed postcards or mimeographed letters to which one contributes no more than one’s signature. Think about it. Your organized bulk emailing makes it difficult for staff to read what constituents have really written, themselves, out of their own minds, concerns and beliefs. You’re getting in the way of representative democracy, and it’s flat cynicism to declare the answer to be tax constituents more to lay on the staff needed to sort, yes, the wheat from the chaff.

AR: Congress needs to know both the specific views of its constituents AND the tallies of pros and cons on issues. Form messages provide the latter, personal messages provide the former. Both are important and legitimate.

I’ve forwarded your response to Ms. Mills

Shapley @ the P-I
p.s. no need to respond, any questions I may have posed were rhetorical.

AR: It seems to me that your rhetorical answers require a response, as they indicate your continued misunderstanding of the issue. I hope you do take the time to read and consider these.

Sincerely,
Alan Rosenblatt

This entry was posted on Friday, June 30th, 2006 at 11:33 am and is filed under Digital Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.