A neighbor talked with me over the back fence:
I live in the 13th Congressional District, which includes Staten Island and the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. During the last two weeks, Michael McMahon, Democrat-Independence, and Michael Grimm, Republican-Conservative, have barraged my wife and me with the usual meaningless glossy direct mail and telephone calls from recording devices and volunteers.
Although we are on both the Federal and State do not call lists, the politicians are exempt from such restrictions. After all, they wrote the laws creating them.
The telephone calls from machines are bad enough. We thought those were appalling, in fact, until we started getting calls from volunteers. Most of the callers are rude, touchy, and obnoxious. They’re largely working from scripts. They become aggressive or insulted when we tell them we’re not interested. They’re are poor advertisements for their candidates.
Everything about the way they behave and talk suggests that our lives are unimportant when set against the necessity of this or that faceless, indistinguishable candidate getting elected.
So, as we know neither McMahon nor Grimm, we can take their measure as men only from the people who support them.
That’s why we’re voting for the third candidate, Tom Vendittelli, Libertarian. Of him, we know nothing, but he’s clearly sincere about his libertarianism: he and his volunteers have left us alone. Perhaps he’ll do the same when he’s in Congress.