TBT: Astroturf is Bad for Baseball and Politics
I’ve been getting robo-text messages from the Nikki Haley campaign asking me to view an important message from the former South Carolina governor. The texts are addressed to Jerry, and they apparently assume I am a Republican.
This is part of a technological shift in campaigning that has been in process for decades, on a continuum of efforts that include direct mail, astroturfing (the use of faux grassroots groups), mass emailing, robo-calling, fax (and, later, email) “bombs,” and other low-effort assaults.
These text messages are harmless, and not particularly noteworthy — except that they give me a chance to share a column I wrote almost 21 years ago after the Republican National Committee “invited” me to be a small business leader.
The column ran Jan. 31, 2003.
DISPATCHES: Astroturf stunts democracy’s growth
Beware of front groups posing as grassroots movements
The Republican National Committee wants me to serve on a special leadership committee for small businesses or at least it did until it found out I wasn’t a registered Republican.
I received a call last week from the RNC’s National Business Advisory Council to inform me that I had been chosen for the prestigious National Leadership Award. I was to serve as an honorary chairman for New Jersey and would have the opportunity to meet with party leaders, to discuss strategy and offer my views on the difficulties faced by small business owners.
U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, House majority whip, recorded a message just for me in which he called me the "backbone of the economy" and said my input was necessary to help craft legislation that would make it easier for small businesses to thrive.
I was a bit nonplussed after all, I am neither a small business owner nor a registered Republican. In fact, as readers of this column can attest, my political views are a bit to the left of the national GOP.
But I figured I’d do my patriotic duty to find out as much as I could about the council, before passing on the invite.
So I listened to the pitch made by Dennis Moye, the RNC representative attempting to bring me into the fold.
He said that, as honorary chairman, I would be invited to meet with President George W. Bush at a special dinner. I would receive special, private surveys in the mail (Oh, joy!) on such important issues as taxes, the economy and the situation in Iraq. My input, he said, would be vital to the future direction of the country.
He said the aim of the National Business Advisory Council was to generate ideas that would allow government to cut taxes and to get the economy moving which I thought was funny given that the Bush administration appears to have already decided to cut taxes.
But then the National Business Advisory Council is not about advising. Rather, it is another in a long list of front groups that politicians of both parties rely on to create the impression that their policy proposals have grassroots support.
It is a processing called "astroturf lobbying." Astroturfing was created by the public relations industry and generally is used by corporations (or corporate industry groups such as the National Chemical Council) to create the appearance that an issue has popular support. According to Sharon Bender, author of "Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism," front groups are designed to lend credibility to what are often unpopular policies the weakening of envronmental regulations, for instance.
"The use of such ‘front groups’ enables corporations to take part in public debates and government hearings behind a cover of community concern," she wrote in the Summer 1998 issue of Public Relations Quarterly. "These front groups lobby governments to legislate in the corporate interest, to oppose environmental regulations, and to introduce policies that enhance corporate profitability. Front groups also campaign to change public opinion, so that the markets for corporate goods are not threatened and the efforts of environmental groups are defused."
Often, astroturf campaigns feature the dissemination of form letters such as the one written by Anthony Ruggiero and published in last week’s South Brunswick Post, of which I also am the editor . The same letter word for word but by different authors appeared last week in the Boston Globe (by Stephanie Johnson), in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat (by Trevor Carlson), in the Star-Press in Muncie, Ind., (by John Pinckney) and apparently in many other papers across the country. (I only ran the letter because it was signed by a local resident we receive letters like this from across the country that we don’t publish. If we had received more than one of the letters which according to Slate, were traced to the NRC’s Team Leader Web site the letters would not have run, as per our policy on duplicate letters.)
Which brings me back to the Business Advisory Council. According to information about the council on the NRC’s Web site, the "Honorary Chairmen are clearly the key, first step" in "forg(ing) a new and dynamic alliance between the Republican leadership and the small business community."
The key element, however, would be the use of my name "whenever possible" in national and local advertising see the above definition of astroturfing. The GOP would craft the message and I would get to lend my name in support which takes the pressure off of me, of course, to actually have something to say. And we’re talking about the NRC spending "in excess of $3.6 million recruiting broadbased support, and an additional $2.5 million in advertising." That’s not chump change.
Again, the idea behind the Business Advisory Council appears to be to generate a list of supporters at which it can point to show it has support a circular argument designed to overwhelm political process and push opposition to the margins.
I don’t want to imply here that the Republican leadership is the only group engaging in this kind of faux organizing most groups from across the political spectrum do it to some degree. Nor is it trying to hide its activity.
But let’s not pretend that it makes for a more active or informed democracy.