Adrian NorthrupI’ve had a lot of random jobs in my life. I’ve cleaned bathrooms at 4 a.m. I’ve taught gymnastics despite the fact that I can’t do a cartwheel. I thought I’d done it all until I became a Republican telephone fund raiser.
Mind you, this was completely contrary to any political beliefs I’d ever held. But that was exactly the point – I figured that as an aspiring journalist, I could use a crash course in seeing life from the other side.
Plus, selling things has never been my strong suit. So I figured maybe I’d learn some new skills – or at the worst, I wouldn’t do the Dems much damage.
I went to an interview, practiced reading a script and was offered a job on the spot. The hiring manager told me I’d learn more about politics than I’d ever want to know. At the time, that was exactly what I was going for.
What I learned about politics was that both sides are full of crap, and that people were just as aware of it as I was.
Once I put on the phone headset, I never knew who would be on the other end of the line. I talked to 91-year-olds and college students, people who had donated thousands of dollars and some who were only making a few hundred a month. Some of them didn’t even speak English. Some pretended they couldn’t. I talked to angry people who blamed Bush for ruining their lives and gung-ho supporters who called CNN the “Communist News Network.”
Also, I learned that I hate Akon’s song “Belly Dancer” with a burning passion. And that somewhere in California they have a phone service that offers hip-hop hold music.
On the whole, very few people tried to mess with me. One lady put her three kids on the line, one after the other, pretending to keep asking for her. A guy, pretended he was talking to his employees even as I was reading my script to him. But only a few people ever actually swore at me.
We raised money for a lot of different candidates, but the format was the same. Build rapport, establish urgency, ask for money. Tell them you respect their empathic “hell no,” tell them why their reason isn’t good enough, and ask for a little less money. If that doesn’t work, give them another reason, ask for a little less money. They say 75 percent of your pledges come on the third ask. But usually the prospect hung up on me after two. I pretty much sucked.
Politically charged information causes people to practice selective critical thinking – an oxymoron, I know. We think we’re taking it in with caution. But it’s human nature to seek out information that reinforces what we already believe, so we dissect opposing information more carefully.
This all snapped in my head during a staff meeting in which one of my bosses was explaining why we were not allowed to tell prospects that the Democrats were not trying to make “San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi” the Speaker of the House.
It was because what they really meant at the time was that they wanted “A San Francisco liberal LIKE Nancy Pelosi” as their next speaker. Somehow, this was different enough to carry an acceptable meaning.
I told my boss it was the most misleading thing I’d ever heard in my life.
It’s all about the subtle blips in honesty. Blips so subtle that I wouldn’t even try to catch them if I trusted the general premise of the argument.
After I finally hung up the headset for good, I started looking at the e-mails and letters I got from Democratic groups on a daily basis asking for money. And I realized they followed a similar structure. They even wrote in the three asks (sometimes more, since you can’t hang up on a letter). I saw the same push to establish urgency, the same carefully selected facts. And instead of filing them away in my head as true, I took a deeper look.
I’ve never given them money. But somehow, I eventually wound up on a few of their call lists. Oh, the irony.
