BCR on Stith's response

Kevin raises some worthwhile points in his analysis of the Thomas Stith email which i discussed below.

Go read it.

Here's the money quote:

Put directly: the robo-calls created an outroar precisely because they left a far different impression on callers than reconciling City policy with on-the-beat practice. They were best interpreted as, and -- I can only conclude -- intended to be, red-meat fodder to shock and awe the voting public.

Can you directly reconcile Stith's more nuanced statement yesterday about aligning policy with practice with a close textual read of the robo-call? Yes. Can you make a case that a variance of policy and practice sets up Durham for still more litigation, as Stith asserted on Monday night at Council? Yes.

But is it reasonable to believe that the robo-call was meant to inform citizens about this procedural question -- instead of using the specter of "illegal immigration" to score points among Stith's political base and moderate voters? That the typical recipient would perform a close analysis of the message text and cross-reference it back to the interaction of two policies and one in-the-field practice?

I doubt it. There's no logical reason for Stith's campaign to have chosen the robo-call tactic, in terms of the precise word choice and the (alleged) targeting of recipients, except to appeal to the basest, darkest, most emotional instincts in us. Not to say you can't and shouldn't have a rational debate over immigration policy (a subject on which I'm fairly middle-of-the-road, personally.) But rationality seemed far removed from this discussion.

Quite right.

UPDATE: i've left a comment on Kevin's blog. hopefully he'll be back from the candidate's forum soon enough to respond to it. But it's the reference to "Stith's campaign" in the last paragraph of the quote above that i want to keep focusing on. As far as i can tell, Stith's call was worded in such a way as to avoid campaign finance disclosure rules. In other words, by avoiding the phrase, "I'm Thomas Stith, and I'm running for mayor," or something similar, Stith was able to avoid having to disclose who paid for the call. That's something i'm curious about. I'd think all of durham's voters should be as well.