So it’s come to this — automated phone dialers leaving messages on hundreds of thousands of answering machines around the country, with still more to go, delivering the “important” message that John McCain and the RNC think Barack Obama is a terrorist:

This is how we now deal with allegations that a sitting United States Senator is committing acts of high treason? Pre-recorded messages? Really?

I guess all those efforts to deal with this issue during the debates just didn’t pan out. Oh wait, McCain didn’t bring this up. I guess they want to talk to all these voters in the swing states about this critical issue, and get the voters’ feedback. Oh wait, nope — it’s a pre-recorded message. I guess they want us to vote for McCain. Oh wait, nope — the sole topic of this voice mail is Obama’s supposed terrorist ties, with a couple references to McCain so people will get the hint. Unfortunately, this breaks one of the critical rules of “marketing 101” — always include an instruction or directive in an advertisement if you expect people to take action.

This crap keeps happening because it’s the only way to make an attack like this. Confront Obama directly about it in a publicly-broadcast forum and it’ll get shut down immediately because it’s so far removed from reality. A decisive dismissal of the whole thing would be catastrophic to this stupid last-ditch “Obama == terrorist” effort.

Engaging voters one-on-one via the telephone (with a live volunteer instead of an auto-dialer) would expose the McCain camp to the risk of learning too early that this nonsense is causing a backlash among its own constituents (do you really think everyone planning to vote for McCain thinks this kind of thing is totally okay?). Wouldn’t want that right now, right? Still need to pretend they can win the election, after all.

Interestingly, the McCain campaign isn’t doing a whole lot with the media to explore this supposed terrorism link either. The media has all but dismissed the claim with a collective yawn (giving the story coverage when it first oozed from the campaign, but otherwise giving it all the attention it deserves — none at all). Meanwhile, you’ll note there’s naturally no official (i.e. legal) investigation going on about the allegations (it would, after all, be pretty bad news for a sitting U.S. Senator to have directly ties to terrorism groups — don’t you think somebody within the Bush Administration or the Bush-friendly Justice Department would have done something with this long ago if it were true?).

The sad part is that to undo this damage that a series of machines is causing will take the efforts of real people having actual conversations with voters instead of sending machines to do that job. You can join them. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a candidate in office who doesn’t leave machines to deal with that “pesky” business of actually talking to constituents?

Stay classy, McCain. You’ll totally win the election with these honorable tactics.

Technorati Tags: 2008 Presidential Election Politics