All presidential campaigns have legions of volunteers staffing phone banks, calling voters to tell them why they should be voting for their candidate. Usually they have a script they’re supposed to stick to. I wonder if this stuff from a Republican volunteer in Florida is part of the script?
“Y’all sound like y’all are senior citizens, right? Yeah. You don’t want Obama. You really don’t want Obama. Because he’ll get rid of your Medicare. You might as well say goodbye to it,” she says. “I don’t know if you’ve done any research on Obama or not, but he is a Muslim, um, he is, um, gotta socialistic view on the, ya know, economy, the government, the whole nine yards. If he had his way, we’d be a socialistic country.”
The volunteer then tells them they should watch Fox News and go see Dinesh D’Souza’s idiotic “documentary” about Obama to learn more about Obama, the Medicare-hating socialist.
15 comments
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Francisco Bacopa
October 3, 2012 at 10:06 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The sad thing is that this shit probably works.
Chiroptera
October 3, 2012 at 10:13 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I thought it was Ryan who would like to take away your Medicare?
Zinc Avenger (Sarcasm Tags 3.0 Compliant)
October 3, 2012 at 10:13 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Chiroptera, #2:
That didn’t play well in focus groups, so now Obama was always the one who said it.
frankniddy
October 3, 2012 at 10:17 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Umberto Eco wrote about the “continuous shift in rhetorical focus” in propaganda. This is a textbook example of that.
Gregory in Seattle
October 3, 2012 at 10:18 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Chiroptera #2 – We are at war with Eastasia. We have ALWAYS been at war with Eastasia.
Florida has some pretty tough laws about recording conversations without the consent of the person being recorded. I strongly suspect that the official response from the GOP will be to file charges. Almost certainly, the charges will stick and the person will be found guilty of a criminal act.
Modusoperandi
October 3, 2012 at 10:20 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Republicans are the protectors of Medicare. Obama stole a million jillion dollars from it and then gave it to poor people. Obama has no plan to deal with its increasing costs. Romney/Ryan will save Medicare, strengthening and encheapening it by freeing it from the shackles of being paid for.
Chiroptera
October 3, 2012 at 10:25 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“I don’t know if you’ve done any research on Obama or not, but he is a Muslim, um, he is, um, gotta socialistic view on the, ya know, economy, the government, the whole nine yards.”
She forgot to add “and stuff” at the end. Then this quotation would be perfect!
eric
October 3, 2012 at 10:25 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Gregory @5: I have always wondered, when you call up some help line or business and get the standard warning (“this call may be recorded for quality purposes…”), doesn’t that automatically mean that the company representative you are talking to has consented to being recorded?
I guess what I’m asking is: does the law require you to consent to every separate recording of an event, or just to consent to the event being recorded? Because if its the latter, then any time someone on the line tells YOU that they may record the call, they are giving you carte blanche to record it also.
Abby Normal
October 3, 2012 at 10:26 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Seems perfectly logical to me, at least under Ellis Washington’s brilliant new school of logic: if A=B then A+B=C.
Jordan Genso
October 3, 2012 at 10:27 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@5
I believe I heard that this audio clip was captured on an answering machine. The lady who was recorded was on a different phone talking to a different person, while someone else’s phone accidently picked up her side of the conversation while an answering machine was recording that phone.
Unless answering machines are illegal, I can’t imagine any crime was committed.
Zinc Avenger (Sarcasm Tags 3.0 Compliant)
October 3, 2012 at 10:33 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@eric, #8:
I have, in the past, used this linguistic ambiguity that way. “You are aware this call is being recorded, for my quality purposes, aren’t you?” can work wonders when you’re talking to a call center that uses the “Magic 8-ball” school of customer service and/or technical support.
Randomfactor
October 3, 2012 at 10:44 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Reportedly Bob Woodward is handing the “appears-almost-sane” version of this particular tactic: Obama will destroy your Medicare in order to “save” it. Probably Romney has promised him the same sort of sweetheart book deal that Dubya gave him.
Bernstein was always the brains of that duo.
comfychair
October 3, 2012 at 11:31 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
No mention of the space lizards under Area51? I’m disappointed.
reliwhat
October 5, 2012 at 9:43 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Vote cthulhu, why vote for a lesser evil?
deborahbell
October 6, 2012 at 7:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I worked in a call center for a couple of years. We had a policy on callers recording calls; basically we were supposed to refuse to have any conversation if a caller stated they were recording the call and ask them to stop and then end the call if they refused to stop. If a customer repeatedly told reps they were recording calls, they could be put on written communication only, meaning no phone rep was ever allowed to speak to them again. The only other times we could hang up on customers was if they refused to stop cursing or sexual harassment after three warnings, and if there was no one on the line after reading the dead air script twice through. It was the company who didn’t want calls recorded; it didn’t have much to do with our personal consent.