So here’s something that doesn’t happen all that often, even in my life: A congressional candidate called me last night. Apparently Kelda Helen Roys is on the ball in responding to tetchy emails. Seriously, she read the email, prepared a response, and dug up my number to deliver it in about 30 hours. That’s efficient.
She wanted to address my concerns, most importantly to deny having deliberately excluded men from the mailing. They didn’t check addresses against property records, so didn’t know they were leaving off an owner, and Nick just never filtered his way into their database. Now, I did check with other people to make sure it was a pattern before writing the letter, but I’ve seen the inside of campaign contact databses – they’re uniformly a disaster of bad design and crappy maintenance. Also, my sample size in verifying was small since most people throw things like that away without looking at them. If she says she only sent the letter to Sylvie and me because we were all she had in the database, I’m inclined to believe her.
Which absolves her of the really damning problem with the letter. The rest of my points being annoyed nit-picks didn’t stop her from addressing them, too, which was nice. I went to all the trouble of nit-picking, after all.
Let’s be honest. She called me, from a non-blocked number, and wrapped the phone call by inviting me to write or call her back any time I had an issue. That’s a lady who wants to get elected. At this point, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a lady who deserves to get elected. Information-oriented campaign letters followed up by personal phone calls to address concerns? Those are campaign tactics that ought to be encouraged, nay, rewarded.
So there it is, internet. I withdraw my ire for Ms Roys and replace it with a hearty, “I think you just won my vote. And possibly some support beyond that.” From somebody who is currently planning to write in “Doomsday Device,” in the presidential election, that’s a big deal.
P.S. Since I know a great many people in her target demographics care, she says she’s not taking corporate money for her campaign, thus the direct outreach for fundraising. I think refusing corporate money is like shooting yourself in the foot, but her constituency seems to like limping candidates, so it’s probably more clever than I’m crediting. And now you know.
Anaea Lay 