...or your own lying eyes
Nov. 4th, 2012 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nancylebovI posted about Obama's campaign being much more savvy about targeting its solicitations. It was a cool article, full of chunky geeky details about what's known about getting people to do things, and it fit my ideas about Obama as a very skillful campaigner.
However, when prodded lightly, I remembered that I've been getting approximately a zillion calls about volunteering for Obama, all of which I've turned down. It doesn't look like they're keeping track, and some of them were from actual human beings whose time and enthusiasm was being wasted.
I've also talked with someone who traveled to do volunteer knocking on doors, and was mostly turned down-- again, not an extraordinary show of skill on the campaign's part.
Of course, Obama's campaign could be 20% or 30% more efficient than Romney's, and it would be very hard to tell from the outside.
So, maybe Obama's campaign has signed on to some good social science theory but it hasn't filtered down to practice. Or the theories aren't *that* good.
However, when prodded lightly, I remembered that I've been getting approximately a zillion calls about volunteering for Obama, all of which I've turned down. It doesn't look like they're keeping track, and some of them were from actual human beings whose time and enthusiasm was being wasted.
I've also talked with someone who traveled to do volunteer knocking on doors, and was mostly turned down-- again, not an extraordinary show of skill on the campaign's part.
Of course, Obama's campaign could be 20% or 30% more efficient than Romney's, and it would be very hard to tell from the outside.
So, maybe Obama's campaign has signed on to some good social science theory but it hasn't filtered down to practice. Or the theories aren't *that* good.
