D ear President Obama: I’m sorry I hung up when you called the other night. That was rude, I know, especially from a supporter, but it was your recorded voice, and it was the dinner hour, and I had just put a couple of thick pork chops in the pan and they would have burned if I listened to you tell me what a nice guy Jon S. Corzine is.
And, I should point out in my own defense, they were really good pork chops.
It wasn’t like we hadn’t already had a bazillion annoying robocalls to our house this campaign season.
In a one-hour span the week before the election, again at the dinner hour, we got calls from Bill Clinton, the National Rifle Association, the National Democratic Party, someone yapping about Corzine’s plans to raise tolls on New Jersey roads and, mysteriously, Sarah Palin.
I don’t know what any of these people wanted to say because I hung up on all of them.
“Who was that, honey?” my wife hollered down from upstairs after one of the calls.
“Sarah Palin,” I said.
“Is she going back to Alaska?” my wife asked.
“We can only hope,” I said.
We went to a dinner party that weekend with several other couples, and the political conversation wasn’t about the merits of the gubernatorial candidates. It was about the unending barrage of robocalls and how tired everyone was of them. We all agreed this was the worst year ever.
I don’t have any empirical evidence to say whether that’s true or not, because the final tally of the number of calls paid for, who paid for them and how much they paid hasn’t been published yet, to my knowledge. When that information is eventually made public, I predict we’ll all be appalled.
But I’m glad the election is over for one simple reason: I might be able to eat dinner this week without being interrupted by some nattering nabob (sorry, President Obama) calling from a blocked or unavailable number so I can’t call him or her back and give them a piece of my mind.
A couple of months ago, I wrote a column saying how happy I was that the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on prerecorded robocalls had gone into effect Sept. 1. I thought it was a grand idea, but I noted that there were exceptions. Banks, telephone carriers and most charitable institutions were exempt. So were people you have a business relationship with. And of course politicians had exempted themselves from the ban because they never like to live by rules made for everyone else.
I should have known that they’d be the ones to abuse us worst of all with their calls.
What can we do about it the next time an election rolls around? Well, a few things actually.
I
will go on record right now and say that in
the future I will refuse to vote for any candidatewhose campaign calls me with a robocall, or whose supporters do so. I don’t care if I have to vote for Daffy Duck, and I might mellow by the time the next election rolls around, but that’s how I feel today. I’m that angry and fed up.
Second, we can start demanding that our politicians do the right thing and ban themselves and their minions from robocalling. As a matter of fact, at every opportunity during the campaign, we ought to ask them if they’ll do that, and we ought to call our state media outlets and ask them to put that question to the candidates as well.
Third, we can get involved with an organization that is trying to do something. We might, for example, register with www.stoppoliticalcalls. org on their website. It’s free to sign up
and, if you do, they’ll register your phone number with what they say is the nonpartisan, nonprofit National Political Do Not Call Registry. Once you register, they say they’ll send out your phone number to all political parties, candidates and any other organization that makes political robocalls to tell them you do not want to receive them anymore.
Will it work? Who knows — the list doesn’t have the force of law like the federal Do Not Call List — but it might, so it’s definitely worth a shot. If enough people register, at least there’ll be strength in numbers and it will make a point. And if you don’t like that particular organization, there are certainly others.
I say we start working now while we’re still ticked off.
• • •
With all the coverage of the gubernatorial campaign in New Jersey, you couldn’t help hearing some talking head opining that the race in this state would be a referendum on Barack Obama’s presidency. The president certainly feared that might be true. He came to New Jersey five times to campaign for Corzine and made that annoying recorded call.
But I don’t think that’s what it was at all. Chris Christie won by a comfortable margin, but I don’t think so many people voted for him to send a message to our new president. I think they voted for Christie because Jon S. Corzine was a poor governor (can I say he was a crappy governor in a family newspaper?), and they were tired of him.
One guy can’t really change that much in the final analysis, and Christie will certainly have his hands tied with the Democratic majorities in the state Assembly and Senate, but Corzine was a lackluster leader in a troubled time. He seemed remote and often arrogant.You got the sense that he was more worried about unions, like the state employees union, and special interests than he was about the average taxpayer. He didn’t explain himself well. He didn’t seem to have a vision about where we needed to go, or he didn’t explain it well if he did. He had bizarre ideas, like selling the Turnpike and raising tolls so high only state employees could afford to use New Jersey’s toll roads When people criticized him, as they did in the first few of those ill-fated town hall meetings on that subject, he didn’t take it well and canceled the rest of the meetings.
In his inaugural address, Corzine said he wanted people to hold him accountable for his actions. That’s what they did last week.
It seems the guy only got what he asked for.
Gregory Bean is the former executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at gbean@gmnews.com.