1115.org

Years ago in the uncharted suburban wilderness of southern New Jersey, the high-school version of me spent a short period working for a telemarketing firm—yes, I was one of the morons who called you during dinner, the one you would yell at before slamming down the phone. When you work for a telemarketing firm, your performance is rated based on the amount of surveys that you complete, so you do anything possible to make sure that the people you call don’t hang up on you. For instance, answering “yes” to certain questions would trigger 20 to 30 minutes of additional questions (which would almost always result in a exasperated hang-up), so the experienced telemarketers would always make sure that such questions were reported as “no”…no matter what the person on the other end of the line actually said. Honest? No way. Accurate? Not a chance. But when a job is on the line, sometimes you don’t want to hear the real response to a difficult question.

I wasn’t a telemarketer for long. But I was reminded of that dank, smoke-filled office when reading a lot of Republicans’ comments on the issues of lobbying and ethics reforms. As I wrote last week, quite a few Congressmen defended the milquetoast bill they were offering by saying that their constituents didn’t really care about the issue. And, if the constituents didn’t care, why should the lawmakers go overboard and make sweeping changes?

There are numerous examples of this kind of attitude, but California’s John Doolittle—who himself is facing accusations of ethical impropriety—sums it up perfectly:

The day before the Republican House leadership struggled for five hours to bring lobby reform legislation to the floor, Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.) declared that voters have little or no interest in ethics legislation.

“Do I think they care about it? No, I don’t,” Doolittle told a reporter. Doolittle said that during the April 7-23 recess, he did not hear “anything about Jack Abramoff,” the central figure in a lobbying scandal.

It seems to me that Doolittle, and the rest of the Republicans who have made similar comments, might be playing their own version of writing down “no” when the answer of the question is “yes”:

A number of polls show the Abramoff lobbying investigation and the guilty plea by former representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) to bribery charges appear to be having a negative effect on the public’s view of the Republican Party in general, as well as on legislators, such as Doolittle, who have been linked to Abramoff.

(…)

Six political scientists of varying political leanings generally agreed — albeit cautiously — that corruption, together with issues such as the war in Iraq and the economy, has the potential to reach a “tipping point” endangering GOP control of either the House, the Senate, or both.

Let it also be said that an April Washington Post/ABC poll found that “63 percent of Americans called “corruption in Washington” important to their vote”, though apparently none of those respondents were in John Doolittle’s district. Or David Dreier’s. Or David Hobson’s. Or any of the other Republicans who voted against significant reforms with the excuse that no one cared.

It might be the easy answer, but it doesn’t mean it’s the correct one.