Future President of the United States Joe Biden in Independence, Iowa, on the Fourth of July, 2019.
This is a bit of a stream-of-consciousness comment, following the phone call I received yesterday that asked me to participate in a survey. It was a robo-call, automated, and purported to be objective, asking for how much knowledge you had about the candidates for Cheri Bustos’ former seat in Congress.
At first, it asked for things that seemed “normal,” such as age, income, and knowledge of the candidates running in the mid-term election.
I did notice that all of the Republican candidates (Esther Joy King) were mentioned first in each and every comparison to her Democratic challenger, Eric Sorenson. You had to punch 1 through 6 for some questions and, in some cases, such as your gender, there were only 2 buttons to click for male or female. A 1 would generally mean that you disliked the remark and a 6 (and just up to that) indicated strong support for the premise, with the middle numbers indicating more neutral stances.
After the routine, normal questions, the questionnaire took a nasty turn.
All of the scenarios that depicted Eric Sorenson (the Democratic candidate) were quite negative. All of the scenarios for the Republican candidate (Esther Joy King) were portrayed much more positively. The backgrounds of the prospective candidates were definitely being “cherry-picked,” for sure. For instance, Sorensen was depicted as just shy of a zealot regarding global warming and bound to spend all of your money on measures to counteract climate change. Quite frankly, as you watch the nightly news of each and every climate disaster, the charge that Sorensen wants to try to fix the flooding and fires seemed like a positive, to me, but the questionnaire found it objectionable that he was in favor of trying to reduce green house gases so that we might be able to get out of the horrible weather cycles we are currently facing. (One has to sigh heavily when thinking of how much more actively this entire situation would have been addressed under President Al Gore way back in 2000. We would have had 22 years to plan for what is now upon us, but “W” and the GOP did not believe in global warming and vocally castigated those who raised their voices with the scientific predictions that are coming true right now.
Most of the situations depicted were actually accusations that Eric Sorensen, a former weatherman, had little to do with. He hasn’t been in office, so he really doesn’t have a track record to mention. They were presented in the context of, “Eric is a Democrat and would support Joe Biden and Joe Biden did ______, ______, and ______.” The things that poor Eric was being accused of were pretty far out there and definitely neither his fault nor something his campaign necessarily ran on. To listen to the recorded voice, poor Eric was almost solely responsible for inflation. Any minute I expected the accusations to veer into criminal territory.
In other words, this so-called objective “survey” was a thinly-veiled advertisement for the GOP candidate.
If you answer your phone and hear that it is a “questionnaire” be warned.
Alexi Giannoulias
I was fortunate that I had researched all of the candidates in the primary and run an informational piece on all of them in both parties and on Alexi Giannoulis, who was running for office after years away from a position in Illinois government.