Political polypresence?

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The White Dog Cafe, a restaurant in West Philadelphia near the University of Pennsylvania, has a pervasive doggy theme, from the numerous dog pictures on the walls to their famous "Leg Lifter Lager". This theme extends to two of the four individual-sized restrooms, which are labelled "Pointers" and "Setters". The remaining two toilets are denominated as "Democrats" and "Republicans". I always use the Republicans, myself, because it's the least used, and therefore the cleanest and the most likely to be free.

Although I'm actually a registered independent, someone has apparently outed my restroom activities to the Republican National Committee, which has begun sending me email. I wrote about one of these notes last week ("It shall be our unity that overcomes", 8/27/2008). This morning's note, said to be from John McCain himself, invites me to take part in the "first McCain Nation national event day" by "host[ing] an event on the evening of August 14th". Senator McCain has offered me several inducements to participate, including one that seems genuinely spectacular:

If you host an event on this day, my staff will send you a host package with special materials for you and your guests. You will also have an exclusive opportunity to be on a conference call and get a strategic briefing and ask questions to one of my top advisors. And while I'd love to be there to talk to you as well, I'm going to send someone even better – my wife Cindy.

Now, I know that there are not very many Republicans in West Philadelphia, but the "McCain Nation national event day" is clearly a, well, national thing, and this is a big country.  Has the RNC licensed polypresence technology from Santa Claus? If I hadn't already been through the process of convincing myself that these emails are coming from the RNC and not from the Russian Mafiya, I'd suspect a scam.

In politics, at least, there's no such thing as Santa Claus; and I also doubt that event hosts are going to get a "flat mommy" version of Cindy McCain. So presumably, what Senator McCain is "sending" his wife to do is to participate in the conference calls. Even that sounds like a pretty good trick, unless they're really *big* conference calls, or her participation in each one is limited to a few seconds, or it's actually a recorded version of her that participates.

Something else I wonder about: what does "ask questions to one of my top advisors" mean? Will event hosts actually get to talk with one of Senator McCain's "top advisors"? Or does "ask questions to" mean something like "submit questions to a filtering process that will lead to some pre-recorded questions being answered during the conference call"?

Anyhow, I hope to learn what these bits of marketing language actually mean. If you sign up to host one of these events, please tell me how it all comes out.

(By the way, is there any political phishing out there? If not, why not? I don't mean fake emails and polls meant to influence public opinion, but criminal attempts to steal money or harvest personal information by fake political appeals. There are some outfits like BMW Direct that are effectively scams, in that they keep nearly all the money that they raise, but that's different from an out-and-out criminal fraud.)



17 Comments

  1. Claire said,

    August 4, 2008 @ 11:58 am

    Here is a website that says it would be easy, but not that it's been done.
    (Note: I tried putting another link to a press release indicating there have been instances of political spam that planted malware, but in the preview, it kept putting a smart quote inside my tag. I hope the link I've included ends up posting correctly.)

    Your restaurant tactic is ingenious. Of course the "Republicans" bathroom is the cleanest and least used! I wish I'd thought of it. But now that you've given away your secret, are you worried that this will become less true?

  2. Bob O'H said,

    August 4, 2008 @ 12:28 pm

    Note you only have the opportunity to be on the conference call – it's not clear to me that you are guaranteed to get on.

    As for republican toilets, should we take the wide stance jokes as read, and move on?

  3. Sili said,

    August 4, 2008 @ 12:52 pm

    I don't know if it's really phishing per se, but Zeno Ferox had some musings about The National Black Republican Association that implies that they come pretty close.

  4. Sili said,

    August 4, 2008 @ 12:56 pm

    Oh – and am I missing something in this? The claim didn't strike me as odd at all.

    Mrs McCain is simply gonna be one of the few people allowed to speak in this case while all the 'hosts' are gonna be on the "listening only" end. Unless they use their '1337 ski11z' to hack the technology.

  5. Joe said,

    August 4, 2008 @ 1:38 pm

    Right now there's a lot of spam using random shocking headlines, which are sometimes political, but I simply haven't seen purely political spam yet. My guess would be that they haven't thought of it yet, or they're waiting until we're closer to the election.

    They'll probably go after the Olympics next, were I to guess. If you want to watch for the latest in spam and malware trends for some reason, I suggest you check these two sites every day or two:

    http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/

    http://isc.sans.org/

    They generally report on anything big or novel that's going on and the newspapers get the news long, long after they've reported on it. Seriously, I've often seen years-old trends or issues hit the media as "new" news (e.g. "Anyone can use an open wireless AP, including bad people! Shocking!").

  6. Amy said,

    August 4, 2008 @ 2:05 pm

    What struck me about McCain's message was the list of benefits offered to potential hosts. "You will also have an exclusive opportunity to be on a conference call and get a strategic briefing and ask questions to one of my top advisors." The use of "and" made me think you get all of these things individually. However, I assume what they mean is that you "will also have an exclusive opportunity to be on a conference call TO get a strategic briefing and ask questions to one of my top advisors." The strategic briefing and question-asking take place on the conference call, they are not additional benefits in the package that is offered to hosts. Then it's easier to infer that the subsequent "and" at the beginning of the next sentence is part of the list of items included in the conference call– namely, Cindy McCain's presence.

  7. Dan T. said,

    August 4, 2008 @ 2:20 pm

    There's no "Libertarians" bathroom? That's discrimination.

  8. Tyler said,

    August 4, 2008 @ 3:49 pm

    The free market will provide its own "Libertarians" bathroom.

  9. Brian said,

    August 4, 2008 @ 4:24 pm

    I have aunts and uncles registered as independents, and they got Christmas cards with George and Laura Bush's photograph on the front. I don't think it was your restroom activities that alerted the RNC- I think they've just taken to marketing themselves to independents more aggresively to try and gather as many swing votes as possible.

  10. Rubrick said,

    August 4, 2008 @ 5:53 pm

    It's nice of him to admit his wife is better than him.

  11. Stewart Haddock said,

    August 4, 2008 @ 11:17 pm

    I just have to say it, "Cindy McCain is the new Santa Claus." X is the new Y. Oh my. I am so lame.

  12. Graham said,

    August 5, 2008 @ 5:25 am

    Is "ask questions TO somebody" good American English? It reads very oddly to this Brit.

  13. Stephen Jones said,

    August 5, 2008 @ 7:39 am

    I had a black friend who lived in Washington and he got an invitation to Reagan's Inauguration.

  14. Stephen Jones said,

    August 5, 2008 @ 7:51 am

    I forgot to mention that he was a lifelong Democrat, like all the rest of his family.

  15. Claire said,

    August 5, 2008 @ 12:35 pm

    Graham: "ask questions to somebody" sounds strange to me, too (and I'm an American English speaker).

  16. Joe said,

    August 5, 2008 @ 1:20 pm

    Graham: I'm also American, and "ask questions to somebody" sounds strange to me as well. I would ask questions of somebody if I were to use that construction.

  17. Graham said,

    August 5, 2008 @ 2:47 pm

    Thanks Joe and Claire – I'm glad it wasn't just me. "Ask somebody questions" or, as Joe says "Ask questions of somebody". Who writes this stuff for the McCain campaign?

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