my week with the republicans (part 1)

Last Friday I got a call from the temp agency I've been working for about a week long assignment. She informed me that it would involved phone banking for the Republican party (and she said "Republican party" like it was a dirty word). She said she understood if I didn't want to take the assignment and I had a quick internal debate. I was so conflicted I told her I'd have to call her back. Because the truth was, I really needed the money from this assignment, but did I really want to work for the Republican party? Eventually I decided that I'd really like to pay my rent this month and, if anything, I might get some good stories out of it.

I showed up at the Romney campaign office Monday morning at 9am and checked in with the woman from the temp agency. There were four tables set up around a shabby front office, each with four phones. I found a seat at a table with three middle-aged black women, because those are my favorite kind of temp workers. I haven't been inside any campaign offices before, but this one was pretty sad. It looked like they just rented out whatever space they could find and slapped a few stickers on the wall. Looking around the room it was clear that we were all temp workers, and I took some pleasure in the fact that they couldn't round up enough volunteers and had to contract out to a temp agency. There's some irony in the idea of a bunch of marginally employed Philadelphians making calls for the Republican party, most, if not all of, of whom are likely Obama voters.

The best/worst part was the script we were given to guide the phone calls we would be making. For some reason we were targeting woman voters, but as you'll see in the image below there wasn't anything that really addressed the concerns of women in the script (you'll also see that I used mine primarily for doodling).

The only difference between the script for women and the script for men is that the women's script mentions "children and grandchildren" whereas the men's script mentions "jobs". That's about as subtle as the Republicans can get with their sexism. Needless to say, most of us abandoned the script after our first couple calls and skipped straight to the questions. There were only two questions. "If the election for President was today, would you vote for Mitt Romney or Barak Obama?" and "Which party do you think can best fix the economy, the Republican party or the Democratic party?" (check back for part two where I'll share some of my favorite answers to these questions.)

You also might notice that the script is all lies, which is another reason why we just stopped saying it (that, and we found that people were less likely to hang up immediately or yell at us if we didn't start the call with, "Let's face it..."). I'm not entirely sure what they were hoping to accomplish with all this, or why they put their faith in a bunch of left-leaning temp workers to make these calls. But most of us made it through the week. And it was a rough week.