Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing
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This past Sunday, my wife and I were having a bite to eat at a local burger joint when the table next to us started talking about how Barack Obama was a Muslim.
This is a result of the sleaze campaigning tactic known as push-polling or robo-polling.
Anyone who stoops to this level doesn’t deserve a seat in a democratic government. Which brings me to Hillary Clinton. The LA Times is reporting there is a Pro-Clinton push poll going around California.
Ed Coghlan was just starting to prepare his dinner in the northern San Fernando Valley the other night when the phone rang. The caller was very friendly. He identified himself as a pollster who wanted to ask registered independents like Coghlan a few questions about the presidential race and all the candidates for Super Tuesday’s California primary.
Ed, who’s a former news director for a local TV station, was curious. He said, “Sure, go ahead.”
But a few minutes into the conversation Ed says he noticed a strange pattern developing to the questions. First of all, the “pollster” was only asking about four candidates, three Democrats — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, who was still in the race at the time — and one Republican — John McCain.
[..]
Every question about the other candidates was negative. If Ed knew, for instance, that as a state senator Obama had voted “present” 43 times instead of taking a yes or no stand “for what he believed,” would Ed be more or less likely to vote for him?
“That’s when I caught on,” said Coghlan. He realized then that he was being push-polled. That malicious political virus that is designed not to elicit answers but to spread positive information about one candidate and negative information about all others under the guise of an honest poll had arrived in Southern California within days of the important election.
This is sad to see… sowing the voters with lies and falsehoods. If you can’t win an election on the facts, you must not have much of a campaign platform.
