Word: robo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Forget about campaign posters, or emails, or leaflets, or door-to-door canvassing. The last two weeks of this election season, as one Ohio congressman put it, are going to be all about "robo-mania...
...Last week, former Secretary of State Colin Powell cited John McCain's automated phone message, or robo-call, linking Barack Obama with "domestic terrorist" Bill Ayers as a reason for crossing party lines to publicly endorse the Illinois Democrat. (The Obama campaign later repudiated McCain's message in its own series of robo-calls). Voters have already received recorded phone messages from Rudy Giuliani, Scarlett Johannson, Jay-Z and "Joe Martinez the Plumber." Even "Obama Girl" is lashing out at the campaign tactic. Listen to various robo-calls from the 2008 campaign...
...weren't perfected until the late 1980s. Since then, thanks to improved technology and decreased cost, the campaign tactic has become the leading method to reach voters. In fact, the Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of American households in battleground states like Ohio and Florida received robo-calls in the final weeks of the 2006 midterm elections, with some voters receiving as many as nine calls...
...course, the technology can sometimes backfire. In March, more than 5,000 residents of Ohio's Cuyahoga County received robo-calls between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. because of faulty programming. That kind of mistake, as one pundit points out, could swing an election in entirely the wrong...
...fall. The McCain campaign brought its red-meat attack strategy to the peninsula - featuring his running mate, conservative Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who suggested at a rally in Clearwater that Obama was an America basher who "worked with terrorists." It has also started contacting voters with automated, so-called robo-calls identifying Obama along with former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Nor did it help last week when McCain, complaining about the admittedly boneheaded voter-registration tactics of left-leaning activist groups like ACORN, somewhat petulantly suggested that Democrat-engineered voter fraud could cost him Florida on Nov. 4. Crist later...