Open Letter to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)
Yesterday - Monday, July 28th - I received nine urgent emails from the DCCC freaking out
about John Boehner's plan to sue President Obama and the possibility that the
House may move to impeach. The general tone of these emails was not just
urgent but hysterical. One, purporting to be from Nancy Pelosi, had the
subject line "kiss all hope goodbye". Seriously? All hope?
Of course,
these emails were not just informative; each one asked - "pleaded" -
for a donation.
You know
very well that this GOP lawsuit/impeachment stunt is a farce and that it poses
no actual threat to the president. You are using a fake crisis to scare
good-faith supporters of the president and the Democratic party into giving you
money. You are pretending that the situation is dire purely in order to
fool your own loyal supporters into giving you money. That is both contemptuous and
contemptible.
And now,
today, I've received three more "urgent" emails (as of this writing -
it's not even noon yet) demanding money. One of them actually pointed out
that I didn't donate on Monday. Your entire aggressive, intrusive,
haranguing approach seems to be based on the assumption that you are somehow
entitled to my money as well as my support.
You falsely
declare that there's a major emergency and that the nation's future is at
stake, and then use this lie as a basis to effectively accuse me of complacency
and shame me into writing you a check.
Your approach is obnoxious and disrespectful in every way. The
almost total contempt that you display towards your own constituents, not to mention the truth itself, is
breathtaking. In an even slightly less cynical political culture, it
would be shocking.
I have no
doubt that yours is an effective fundraising strategy. Indeed, that has
been proved by the record number of "grass roots" donations you
received on Monday. And I'm sure you've carefully considered all the
angles and calculated the various costs and benefits of your approach,
including the minor cost of alienating a few cranks such as myself.
What's more, I'm not hopeful that anyone who can cheerfully participate
in such cynical and manipulative tactics would be inclined to take my remarks
very seriously. Nevertheless, I'm writing this, if only to enter an objection
into the public record and to call on the leadership of the Democratic Party to
stop treating Democratic supporters as dupes and idiots.
I vote in
every election. I've never voted for a Republican in my life, and I'm
certainly not going to do so this time around. But I'll be damned if I'm
going to give you as much as a nickel until you start treating Democratic
citizens with a modicum of respect - or at least as something other than easy
marks for a shabby short-con. In this respect, you're exactly as bad as
the GOP.
JP Bernbach
(NB: this post has been updated from its original form to include the exact content of the letter I ultimately sent to the DCCC)