The story starts innocently enough, a campaign worker for the Moccia campaign sends out an email appeal for advertisers for a Moccia fundraiser. The email landed in the email box if Democratic Town chair Galen Wells, who promptly fired off an email to the campaign volunteer and Art Scialabba who is the Moccia campaign manager replied.
Galen wrote:
Are you sending this out to a Chamber list? If so, please
forward it to me so that I can use it for the Dems. The Chamber tries to
deal evenhandedly with political campaigns.
Art replies:
As you may know, one thing I did when I was Chairman of the RTC was to sign
us up as a member of the Chamber of Commerce. With that, as I am sure you
know, comes a yearly membership book, listing members names, addresses,
etc…If you need a copy of that book, I am sure that the chamber would be happy
to provide it to you once the DTC joined as a member, since that book is
something that I believe all members do receive.Once you have the book, I am sure your people can do exactly what we did,
and that is to create your own computer list to use from the information
detailed in the membership book.Obviously, since we created our own list and since we did not receive
anything special from the chamber that as members we should not have
received, we therefore have nothing that we will be passing on to you.However, if you are still interested in our list, and if you don’t have the
time or the man power to create one on your own, our list may be available
to the DTC for a fair price. Then again, I really don’t see that happening -
but you can always make us an offer….
So what can we conclude from this beyond the “gee, Galen is lazy” aspect? My 2007 Who’s Who Greater Norwalk Chamber Business Directory, does in fact likes the Norwalk Republican Town Committee as a member along with the email addresses of members. But Galen could have gone to the and seen the entire membership list with emails without even having to be a member.
Is this a sign of desperate times for the Norwalk Democrats that they can’t even muster a volunteer to cut and paste email addresses off a web site? A Republican at the HQ opening last night remarked, “It seems that the Democrats aren’t even running this year, they don’t even have the election day listed on their calendar.” Sure enough, as of this morning, doesn’t list the election day. Of course the Republicans haven’t mustered a volunteer to produce an RTC web site this year, but at least the Moccia web site does. The Briggs web site does not.
This is all basic marketing 101. At least Democrat Andy Garfunkel has single handily managed to run an actual campaign this fall. And yes, he managed to get that election date on his web site. (Joanne Romano did not.)
