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Congress Funds Study on How To Avoid Constituents, Stay in Office

Councilman

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Congress Funds Study on How To Avoid Constituents, Stay in Office The Foundry
The story is short but important to know.
Posted October 28th, 2009 at 5.13pm in Ongoing Priorities.
This Friday, the tax payer funded Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) is hosting a briefing for Members of Congress and their staff on their new study: Online Town Hall Meetings: Exploring Democracy in the 21st Century. The CMF study consisted of 21 townhall meetings where Members of Congress and CMF provided a moderator: “spoke via voice over IP, and constituents asked questions and made comments by typing them. Only off-topic, redundant, unintelligible, or offensive questions were screened, and only questions asked by people who had not yet asked a question were prioritized.”

CMF does not say what qualifies as offensive, but if this summer is any indication that definition would include anything that the Congressman did not want to talk about. In other words, this report urges Congressmen not to actually interact with their constituents, but to avoid them altogether by holding safe townhalls they can completely control. And what did CMF find where the results of these Potemkin townhalls?
The online town halls increased constituents’ approval of the Member. Every Member involved experienced an increase in approval by the constituents who participated. The average net approval rating (approve minus disapprove) jumped from +29 before the session to +47 after. There were also similar increases in trust and perceptions of personal qualities – such as whether they were compassionate, hardworking, accessible, etc. – of the Member.

The lesson: avoid your constituents’ inconvenient questions and your approval ratings will rise. And this is a taxpayer funded study. Here is the grant from the National Science Foundation.

Congress is actually using your tax dollars to pay social scientists to find ways they can avoid actually talking to their constituents while improving their chances of reelection.

Any question about whether the Dims (no spell error) will listen to their constituents has been answered. What's worse is we payed to teach them how to ignore us. Welcome the new openness and inclusive responsive era of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, control.
Get a grip and know that you and your views unless you fall in goose step with the Dims you don't matter a tinkers damn.
 
I don't see what's wrong with any of that; people who haven't had a question yet ought to be prioritized. As far as the 'offensive' thing goes, that's a pretty exaggerated implication.
 
I don't see what's wrong with any of that; people who haven't had a question yet ought to be prioritized. As far as the 'offensive' thing goes, that's a pretty exaggerated implication.

You see this is exactly what is wrong in this Country today. It is the job of any elected official to represent and carry out the wishes of his or her constituents all of them all of the time. The story says, in other words, this report urges Congressmen not to actually interact with their constituents, but to avoid them altogether.
This clearly points out that what Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, have said about the new openness and bipartisan blah, blah, blah, was just another in a long line of lies. They have a Socialist/Communist agenda and they are not going to allow the will of "WE THE PEOPLE" interfere with it. This is a way to help their goose stepping pals learn to better ignore the people.
To claim this exaggerated implications is to ignore the facts that lead to this.
 
Seems to me like the study is helping constituents connect effectively with Congress people.

The shouting that went on at town halls this summer was disgraceful. But why is this about 'the Dims'? The group is a nonpartisan group. They worked with Dem and Republican members of Congress; the meetings were held in the summer of 2006, and one in 2008. All of it was before the rowdiness that characterized the summer of 2009. Although, in light of it, I'm sure more people will be interested in the study.
 
I would say the reason it's about the Dims is because at the Town Halls held by those who were willing to listen and honestly respond to their constituents there was no shouting. The people who went to those meetings based on the hours of video available made it clear the elected officials were there to give lip service and felt they could lie to the people who were better informed about the contents of HR 3200 than any member of Congress in attendance. There was a great deal of teying to redirect questions and or to answer questions that were never asked and it didn't work.
The problem no is that with the 1990 page fiasco that was just released and already had a number of pages added to it the picture will be even murkier and create more unrest with the majority of Americans who don't want big brother nanny state interfering in their insurance they have to cover the approximately 12 million who have no coverage. It seems that the 14 million or what ever number Obama pull out of then air was nonsense. The people not covered today could easily be covered quite nicely with a tiny fraction of the cost projected under the Obama style plan from the house or anything coming from the Senate.
just think what it would have done for the economy if all or just half of the stimulus money had been given directly to the people in increments spread over say a whole year. The economy would be booming by now and thousands of home foreclosures could have been avoided and some banks might not have failed.
But no that makes too much sense so now we have a dictatorial government making plans to force the people to pay for things they don't need or want and those in power are and have been taught to ignore them and tell them their too stupid to know what's best for them. Oh yes and they are taught to do it and still stay in power when they are done. Real flippen nice.
 
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