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Anti-Hillary robocalls nabs award

(The Post & Courier (SC))

Anti-Hillary robocalls nabs award

South Carolina's reputation for bare-knuckle politics will get a boost because it was home to the weirdest political phone call in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Shaun Dakin, who founded The National Political Do Not Contact Registry, said people visiting his Web site deemed that of all the automated political phone calls — also known as robocalls — during the past year, the strangest took place right here. It was the apparent work of a Texas man.

The call, received by several people across South Carolina, came just before South Carolina's Jan. 26 Democratic presidential primary.

"Hello. FBI agent Gary Aldrich says that Hillary on Inauguration Day 1993 was in an uncontrolled and unbridled fury, yelling and screaming profanities, because she was not allowed to have Vice President Al Gore's office in the White House," the call began. "Hillary treats people like they are invisible. Can you trust her?"

The robocall call also accused Hillary Clinton of various other misdeeds. At the end, it asked, "Hillary makes up fairy tales about adopting an orphan child. Can you trust her?"

The Post and Courier knew of the call but didn't report on it for two reasons: The call was so goofy that it was hard to imagine it having any influence on voters and it did not appear to be a case of one presidential hopeful playing dirty against another.

The Clinton campaign ignored it.

The Washington Post did a story on the call after a Greenville woman reported the call to a Clinton staffer there. The Post's story noted the call was placed by Robert Morrow, a Texas man already known among national reporters for his e-mail tirades against the Clintons.

Attempts to reach Morrow on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

Dakin said most robocalls are done by campaigns, political parties or political action committees, not by individuals.

"Robert Morrow claims that he made these calls alone and with no coordination with any outside group," Dakin said.

Dakin, who aims to convince politicians to avoid making automated phone calls to voters who don't want them, selected eight possibilities for the worst robocall award and five possibilities for the weirdest one. Almost 10,000 people cast votes at his Web site, www.StopPoliticalCalls.org

The worst robocall was one in which the Republican National Committee told voters, "You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans. And Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington."

Reach Robert Behre at 937-5771 or rbehre@postandcourier.com.