Woman Quits Rather than Read a Republican Script
Chaylee Cole should get a job with the Obama campaign. She stood tall in the face of Republican dirty tricks. But the real story here is about Republican incompetence, an inability to supervise how their own money is spent. They’re being soaked for every penny possible by a Direct marketing firm.
Hey, those phone calls paid for by the McCain campaign aren’t just robocalls. A Philadelphia firm, 1.2.1 Direct Response, has been contracted to do telemarketing with basically the same message linking Obama to Ayers, the same message that has Republican Senators like Gordon Smith, Norm Coleman, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins distancing themselves from the McCain campaign. At the call center in West Virginia, Chaylee Cole has quit her job over the ugly message she was paid to give over the phone. From the Charleston Gazette:
“I was working at the call center,” Cole said. “We got a campaign ad talking about how Obama had been part of terrorist attacks on the Capitol, the Pentagon and a judge’s home and had ties with Bill Ayers.
“Last Thursday, I told them I did not want to read it,” Cole said. “They said, ‘Either you read it or you go home.’
“I told them I wasn’t going to read it. They made me go home without pay for the rest of the day.”
The “work paper” told callers to say:
“Hello, I’m calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers [airs], whose organization bombed the US Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge’s home, and killed Americans.
“And Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington. Barack Obama and his Democrat allies lack the judgment to lead our country.
“This call was paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee.”
Cole said, “We were just supposed to read that message and hang up. One of my other issues working there was that someone told me it didn’t matter who picked up the phone, whether it was a 5-year-old or a 95-year-old. We should read the message.”
I like that last bit. Oh, sure, it is good to see a worker stand up against the negative campaigning she was forced to do, but the deeper insight is in the incompetence of it all. They are told to speak to even five year olds? They are told to rudely hang up? What that’s about is a Direct Marketing firm being paid for completed calls, and one that wants to soak the Republican Party for every single penny they can. and what it says, besides the stupidity of the Republicans for thinking negative calls work, is that they are incompetent with quality control. They waste their money when calls are made to five year olds and when they end rudely.
Incompetence, of course, is part of the Republican brand now.
I think I might have responded a bit differently - I would have slightly altered the message I was reading:
“Hello, I’m calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that the McCain campaign is unfairly smearing Barack Obama, and lying to you when they ask me to tell you he has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers [airs], whose organization bombed the US Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge’s home, and killed Americans while not telling you about McCain’s long standing friendship with convicted terrorist G. Gordon Liddy.
“And McCain is trying to scare you and lie to you when he says Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington. Barack Obama and his Democrat allies lack the judgment to lead our country.
“This call was paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee.”
Also not sure how long I would last in this kind of job…
@ (: Tom
:
I think how long you would have lasted in that job, reading your revised script is directly related to how closely they are actually monitoring the callers… and as Steven has pointed out “quality control” is NOT in the McCain campaign playbook… although the outfit hired may be a bit more observant..
Also, I’d like to commend you on your revised script, most excellent.
sukabi, a long time ago, and in another world far away, I worked as a consultant with a firm that did telemarketing fundraising. I actually did a deep web search to see if this Republican firm was related to the principles of the firm I worked for over ten years ago. I can find no such evidence.
But I do know intimately the ways qualitgy control works, and I do know that the contract likely works based on completed calls, thus the instruction to speak to five year olds. Actually, it was that part of the story that made me search for the principles of my former firm, as they were innovative in the industry in including “completed calls” as a major feature of contracts.