I have no idea how Barack Obama got my email address but a few
weeks ago there it was in my inbox — a message from the President.
I decided to break my lifelong rule of zapping all emails from
strangers and so, out of curiosity, I opened it up. I got a lot
more than an email.
Under the spell of the wizard in the White House, I then
clicked on “I’m in,” opening a floodgate of junk email that now
seems unstoppable. A new message from the fundraising team arrives
almost daily, sometimes twice a day.
After a few weeks of reading these solicitations, I have
to conclude that Obamaspam is indiscriminate in its distribution
and offensive in its false bonhomie, its tricky come-ons, its
crackerbarrel language (“folks” and “pitch in” recur annoyingly)
and its presumption of friendship.
I don’t like being addressed as “Friend’” by people I have
never met. I even got one from his wife, signed simply “Michelle.”
Fortunately, my wife never saw that one. It was pretty
chummy.
The most frequent messages are the ones that insult my
intelligence. The series began with the subject line “Sometime soon
can we meet for dinner?” Click on that and you get a real downer.
You are invited to be among almost a million or so people who are
gambling that they will be one of the lucky four selected for his
next face-to-face feed with his “Friends.” But if you want to play
— another downer — you have to pay. The next click tells you to
contribute money if you want to be in the draw.
A friend who knows something about direct mail says a
surprising number of very sad people will choose to believe —
against all logic — that they have a chance to win such games, and
so they will contribute and sit by their computer and
hope.
In another twist, the distribution list is now being used
for non-funding objectives. Last week I was instructed to call John
Boehner and demand action on the Jobs Act. The email included
Boehner’s phone number and a suggested script to read into the
answering machine. It would be hard to imagine a more futile
activity than such nuisance calls.
Off-putting as Obamaspam seems, it cannot be blamed
entirely on Obama. The copywriting obviously has nothing to do with
the President, his wife, or his various minions who lend their
names to such chaff. This is the work of paid professionals who
know something about loosening up purse strings. The practice has
multiplied since email distribution made it so cheap. No paper, no
postage. Just press send.
The campaign also clashes with the President’s pose as Mr.
Everyman, just workin’ hard to help folks live better. Come on,
just pitch in and help out. Grassroots, that’s his secret. Well,
except for Wall Street donors who incidentally are switching by the
hundreds to Mitt Romney, a turnaround specialist and a friendlier
face for financial industry regulation.
If he depends on grassroots too much, he may want to think
again. Average donations compared to his 2008 records are down, and
the number of new donors is too small to compensate. His begging
letters until a few weeks ago asked for a modest minimum of $5.
That wasn’t working. Now he is asking for a minimum of $3. Where is
this headed, one wonders.
With a whiff of desperation, the tone has moved from
chatty and folksy to hectoring.
Friday of last week I got a shortie from him saying the
cutoff for contributing to his third-quarter intake of campaign
funds was looming. “The deadline’s midnight, so don’t sit on this
one.” Wow.
One of the most inappropriate messages I received was an
unashamed invasion of my privacy. His team had used a computer
snooping technique to find that Brookline Mass was the city I was
writing from, although I don’t actually live there. The message was
calculated to trigger a surge of guilt with a tinge of envy.
Records showed that 731 people in Brookline had donated to his
cause. “You aren’t one of the 731,” it said ominously. I hope he
didn’t tell the 731 where I can be found. I felt guilty, envious,
and also a little bit afraid.
A marketing guru in San Francisco, David Garfinkel,
expresses no surprise at the dog whistles embedded in these emails.
“The Seven Capital Sins are the copywriter’s best friends,” he told
me — especially pride, envy, greed and sloth.
I asked Garfinkel why Obamaspam was rubbing me the wrong
way. He said the writers know what they’re doing; I am just on the
wrong wavelength. For a true believer, he said, “it will ring your
chimes and light up your day. Endorphins and dopamines will flow
from you brain to your body as your dollars flow out.”
If I have reservations about the source, however,
“cortisol, adrenaline, and all the biochemistry of anger and
disgust will well up in your system. You’ll have just as emotional
a reaction as the believer, but on the negative side of the
spectrum.”
Even the clubby button “I’m in” was probably chosen with
good reason, he adds. “One of the most fundamental primordial
instincts we have is to find a group we want to be a part of, and
do all we can to get into it.”
As for the overly familiar vernacular that seems to come
from a semi-literate source, it doesn’t. “This is affirmation
language, a direct mail technique of speaking in the voice of the
recipient,” says Garfinkel.
Campaign manager Jim Messina boasts that in October he
expects to see his list of small-denomination donors reach one
million, and exhorted me to “be in the first million.” I don’t
think so, Jimmy. I’m very afraid.
