I just received a very distressed phone call from someone running errands this morning in NE Ohio. His first words were, “Someone is making a lot of money.” He went on to say that,
It’s one political ad after another on the radio – even 107! Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones hawking this one, Barack Obama telling us about hope in the other one – it’s insane and it’s not even Tuesday yet!
I received four or five phone calls yesterday, and Friday night, during Shabbat, after I’d received two or three afternoon calls, from live and robovoices, I made my son pick up the phone (wouldn’t you know it was a person I actually needed to talk to?).
My favorite ones so far: Cuyahoga County Judge Stuart Friedman‘s robocall. I’m paraphrasing:
Hi. This is Judge Stuart Friedman. I know. You hate these calls. And I really hate these calls.
Judge Friedman has been a judge for at least 18 years, because when I was clerking during the summer of 1990, while in law school, he was on the bench. And he says his spiel with such real-toned exhaustion. I hung up on him, but I was laughing in a goodhearted way. (Hmm – just looked at his picture – might be a different Stuart Friedman than one I remember.)
Then, there was the call yesterday where they tell me to “push 1” if I’m a woman and “push 2” if I’m a man. You know which one I pushed? Yup – 2. And the call says a couple of things about voting and hangs up on me! Anyone guess who paid for that call? It starts out saying it’s some analytics group.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better and I’m rounding up a big batch of posts and news and polls to prove it. Stay tuned.
Shout out to Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island – is it like this there too?