Terry McAuliffe's Plan To Ensure Postal Workers Vote Republican

I recently got a pair of "URGENT: EXPRESS PRIORITY" packages in the post from Terry McAuliffe and Nancy Pelosi. I'm not even registered Democratic, so I don't know where they would have gotten my name from. Perhaps the ACLU or EFF, bravely defending privacy in the digital age of conglomerate databases? Who knows. Rip 'em open, and... they're just polls.

Here's a hint, guys: Lying to your constituents and making the Democratic Party look like the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes will not make people trust you.

Here's another hint: For the cost of a couple overnight express mailings to party sympathizers, you could pamphlet every single house in the United States and get your message to people who would not otherwise hear it.

Here's yet another hint: If you can't trust yourself to express your policy reasoning well enough that you think you need to run it through a poll first, keep your mouth shut on the issue.

Evidence of incompetence, bias, and partisan thinking continues into the poll text itself. McAuliffe asks the reader to Borda-rank certain political issues by their importance. At the top are issues Democrats have been promoting lately (the economy, health care) while at the very bottom of the list are "Combating terrorism" and "Strengthening our national defense", making them appear as afterthoughts that barely made it into consideration.

When McAuliffe's poll asks for donations, it requests $7.50 to "defray the costs of processing my survey". If the Democrats' operations are so inefficient that it costs them one man-hour to process each returned survey, are we supposed to trust these guys to wrangle deficits and be the fiscally responsible party? Also, certain questions in the Pelosi poll give you the options of "Strongly opposed" or "In favor", without the options of being strongly in favor or mildly opposed. This is likely an editing mistake from reducing the number of answers and it should have been caught by somebody before the mailing was sent.

A more egregrious example of idiocy is both mailings' use of euphamisms in place of the word "abortion". Instead, they speak of "protecting a woman's right to choose" as if she were considering what brand of laundry detergent to buy. Refusing to speak openly about an issue makes the issue appear not worth discussing or defending.

The worst offense was on the provided return envelopes. McAuliffe's was stamped "Rush", apparently to seek preferential treatment from the post office. Pelosi's was much, much worse. The envelope proudly stated, "Your first-class stamp on this envelope helps elect Democrats". While similar to the Treasury's printing one of Bush's campaign slogans on the envelopes for Joe Lieberman's tax rebate cheques, it is far more blunt and offensive. In fact, it made me seriously hope the post office had George W. Bush stamps that I could plaster several around these words, and anyone who has been reading me for a while knows my low opinion of that guy.

These mailings evidence the stereotypical closedmindedness and self-worship that Rush Limbaugh and friends are always accusing the Democratic Party of, and do this to such a degree that I might wonder if they were Republican fakes intended to disparage the Democrats if they weren't so obviously written by people who support Democratic Party positions and are heavily insulated from the real world. At the cost of finding out whether Democratic supporters support Democrats, every mail carrier who handles a letter stating "Your first-class stamp on this envelope helps elect Democrats" will now think a little less of the party.

Posted by Warrior Tang at August 14, 2003 06:18 PM

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