Posted by
OntheFence on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 4:36:00 PM
The folks over at Talking Points Memo, http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/, had an interesting piece on Republican Presidential hopeful and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Movie jokes involving his last name aside, their is nothing funny about the ring of automated Robo calls now associating themselves with the Huckabee campaign.
A non-profit group known as Common Sense Issues has been deploying the calls in favor of Huckabee and frankly the numbers are staggering, according to TPM:
"In addition to the approximately 850,000 calls in Iowa and 1 million in South Carolina, the group made 800,000 in New Hampshire, and already hundreds of thousands in Florida (he said it wasn't up to a million "yet"). They're on the phones currently in Michigan, he said, and have reached on the order of two million homes."
What can you expect if one of these robo's comes calling?
Apparently the voice will ask you which candidate you are supporting then proceed to make negative comments about that candidate and offer a slew of support for Mr. Huckabee. These robo callers make no bones about their support for the big Bee. According to TPM, one phone call lasted as long as 2 min. and 45 sec. so be prepared for a lot of Huck love.
Common Sense Issues cites "Personal Identification Artificial Intelligence" as the reason why these robo calls are not push polls, which simply spread negative information, thus attempting to maintain any legality.
I can't say I'm prepared to discuss any candidates qualifications with a robot voice caller, and although you have to love a name like Huckabee, these calls seemingly fall into a telemarketing category, something no one enjoys. Either way, contacting millions of people is no small feat, thus i would have to say an A for effort, only time will tell if that work was in vein.
Check out the TPM article here: http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/005057.php