Section 3: Contacting your politician

Although they don't always realize it, deep down your elected officials really appreciate your input. Even the ones who refuse to admit this cannot deny that they occasionally need your input to help them make a smart decision. Admittedly, they're usually more interested in appeasing the powerful corporate lobbies in their district than they are in you or me, but persistence and dedication can still yield results. As much as the lobbyists would like to cut us out of the process, the people do still hold some power in the electoral process. Perhaps your most valuable tool is your access to their constituents. By actively engaging with other voters in your district you are acting as a direct link between your legislator and the people she needs to appease to retain her power. This is where those alliances you made earlier on yield their dividends. The following guidelines should help you to maximize this leverage.

Become a Formidable Constituent

One of the first thoughts that crossed your mind when you first considered contacting a legislator or other politician may have been something to the effect of, "Why should she listen to me? I'm just one voter amidst a swarm of corporate lobbyists and special-interest groups." Unfortunately for democracy in the United States, there is much truth to this statement, and most politicians are not going to side with a single voter against a powerful corporation or lobbying group. Politicians will do virtually anything for campaign contributions because the money provides what they need to remain in power: access to the active voters in their constituency. While the obvious solution to the incredible level of corporate corruption in U.S. politics is a simple campaign finance program, the elite interests that run the system have waged a fierce--and thus far successful--war against the movement for reforms in campaign financing. The good news is that you can still influence your chosen politician if you consider a few key factors.

Votes Trump Money1

Politicians use all the money they receive as campaign contributions to purchase the one thing they need: access to their voters. The array of political advertisements that you encounter in newspapers, magazines, television programming and in other places are the primary tools that politicians use to reach their constituencies. As an active citizen, however, you can bypass the expensive advertisements and offer your politician a pipeline directly into her pool of registered voters.

First, ensure that you are an active participant in the electoral process. This means registering to vote, and then doing so. Moreover, you need to vote at every election you can, including non-presidential elections, local elections, and primaries (if you belong to a political party). As far as her self-interest goes, your politician does not have much incentive to listen to you if you are not an active voter.

The next step is to expand your active voting to a group of peers and family members. This goes back to the coalition we discussed in the first chapter. Convince each member of your group to vote actively, and to encourage her peers to do the same. Then, when you do contact your politician, include the name of each person in your coalition, and emphasize the fact that each person listed votes actively and discusses these issues with her voting friends. When you do this, you're creating something that Naomi Wolf calls an "electoral affinity group" that works together on important issues. The power of such a group can easily match--or even exceed--that of a large campaign contribution, as it is a direct link to a social network within a politician's constituency.

The Written and Spoken Word

The office of each member of the U.S. Congress tracks the number of times it is contacted on an issue and the position of each contact. This allows the congressperson's staff to report quickly summarize the opinions of h(is|er) constituency. For example, a senator's office could report that it has received 400 letters and telephone calls urging her to vote 'No' on the immunity amendment to FISA, and 200 urging her to vote 'Yes'. While the expensive lobbyists hired by the industries to undermine the democratic process still exert a stronger influence than the people, enough pressure from the constituency may push your congressperson in the proper direction. Moreover, if you are working with a grassroots organization, you also have some substantial resources at your disposal, and your congressperson will most likely recognize this. Often, these same grassroots organizations will offer you a list of pointers on what to say or write. Alternatively, researching an issue and thinking carefully about it may help you to come up with a list of your own. In either case, you should have a written list of key points to cover before you contact your official. To maximize the effectiveness of your efforts, you should plan to keep a spoken conversation down to 5 to 10 minutes, and a written letter to no more than 2 pages. Rehearse your conversation with a friend beforehand, and have someone you know to be a skilled writer proofread your letter.

Your official's contact information should be provided on h(er|is) website. Websites such as that of Project VoteSmart also attempt to provide reasonably up-to-date contact information.

What should I say?

While you may be tempted to lambaste your legislator's office in your telephone call or your letter, you will likely find your efforts much more productive if you try to focus on three main concepts:

• What the issue is -- Provide a succinct (in the case of a telephone call, one sentence) description of the issue you are concerned about. If the person is not familiar with the issue, this background can be helpful. If (s)he is already familiar with it, then you are demonstrating that you have taken the time to research the issue before speaking up.
• Why the issue matters -- While this may seem rather crass with some issues, you are much more likely to motivate a politician to do something if you can explain how it affects her personally, particularly at the polls.
• What needs to be done -- If you are willing to invest all this effort, then you clearly want your politician to do something about the issue. Even if you encounter resistance in the beginning, presenting a clear request gives you a starting point to begin negotiating a compromise.

Placing a call

Make sure you are in a quiet environment and have enough time to devote to the call (i.e. making the call while walking across campus to your next class which starts in 10 minutes is not advisable). Once you reach someone, identify yourself and the organization you may be affiliated with. After the introduction, state your main issue and what you would like from your politician in less than one minute. If it is appropriate, you may wish to add that you would be willing to meet with someone at that office to discuss their position on this issue. If the person you are speaking with requests more information, you should offer to send additional information about the issue and your position on it. Then send the information immediately after the conversation, or as soon as possible if it is something you have to acquire elsewhere.

Writing a letter or Sending an email

This option may seem less daunting than a telephone call, especially since many organization prepare 'cookie cutter' letters for you to send on specific issues. Although these pre-formated letters are rarely effective, many people find it easier and less intimidating to spend a few minutes personalizing a pre-written message than drafting a letter on their own. Below is an example of an open letter provided by the ACLU requesting that legislators take steps to ensure that our medical records don't become marketable commodities2. Try to think of ways that you would personalize this letter for one of your legislators.

My medical information is so personal. Any bill that becomes the vehicle for health IT development needs to include privacy protections and real patient control of data, including a right to:

1. Review my files
2. Correct bad data
3. Block access without his/her consent to personal info

Patients need to know who has access to their health records. Without such knowledge, patients may hesitate to discuss personal or embarrassing symptoms with their doctors for fear of who may have access to it when it's plugged into a database.

I noticed that Microsoft promises they won't use health information in their database for commercial purposes. Congress needs to protect our information so it can preserve the open dialogue between doctor and patient which is so vital to patient health.

Please protect my health, and thanks for listening.

A personal letter (even if it is affiliated with an organization) is always more powerful than a generic one, and the more you can bring the issue back to your politician's constituents, the more incentive you provide for her to address the issue.

Remember that whoever is going to read your message probably sifts through several letters regularly, and she likely has an exhausting daily schedule. Therefore, you can maximize your letter's effect by drafting your message in a manner that is courteous enough to stand out and succinct enough to hold the reader's attention. Always place your address at the top of posted letters, followed by the office you are addressing (see the example letter). For reasons unbeknown to the authors, most elected officials are referred to as "The honorable ..." in official correspondence.3 While this title is rarely appropriate to the party you're addressing, it does (in theory, at least) apply to the office (s)he represents.

A note on common courtesy

Regardless of how egregious you may feel a politicians abuses on an issue have been, tempering your approach with a basic level of respect and common courtesy will often get you further than a boisterous or confrontational approach. While an occasion for more direct and possibly even violent action may eventually arise, the sword should never be your first resort. On the other hand, this does not mean that you should compromise your morality or ethics on an issue. Just remember that there is a real human being on the other side of the table, with authentic hopes, dreams, fears and joys, just like you. This empathy is often what causes such a strong sense of outrage against an injustice, and we must nurture this empathy and apply it universally. Perhaps this point can be more clearly illustrated by the following firsthand account of an incident that occurred during a local election. The parties involved have given me permission to use their real names here.

The father of my brother-in-law Mike's friend, Jason, was running for office, and Mike and Jason were campaigning on his behalf at a polling office. Jason's father's view on abortion was apparently somewhat unfavorable with some people, and while Jason and Mike were standing at one of the desks a woman approached Jason with a scowl on her face.

"I got a problem with you!" the woman intoned, as she stood and pointed her finger at Jason.

Apparently, Jason had been on the receiving end of more than one of these monologues, and rather than smile and bear the abuse, he decided that he had taken enough.

"Excuse me, I'm Jason. Have we met?" he asked as he offered his hand to the startled woman, who responded with a simple "Well--no."

"Okay," Jason explained, "because I was just wondering if there was something that I had done to make it okay for you to be rude to me in public."

Now completely deflated, the woman silently walked away without addressing the issue that had prompted her ill-considered attack. As the woman retreated, the politician running against Jason's father reached across the desk to shake Jason's hand. "I've been wanting to say that all day," he confided to the two, "thank you!"

The simple truth is that politicians receive a great deal of abuse. While you could make a fairly strong case that many of them have earned a fair proportion of this abuse, they are human beings, and tempering your arguments with courtesy and respect can sometimes make them much more powerful than an aggressive or forceful delivery. Moreover, you will likely need to go to the same people again on another issue, so leaving a positive impression will greatly increase your likelihood of being heard a second time.

1. 1. This phrase is quoted from Wolf, N. 2008. Give Me Liberty: A handbook for American revolutionaries. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, United States. 376 pp. Purchase from Amazon
   Roughly one-third of this book is devoted to practical guidelines and basic information for aspiring activists.
2. 2. Letter content copied from the ACLU's website at http://www.aclu.org/
3. 3. L. Sue Baugh's exhaustive text, Handbook for Practical Letter Writing, includes a detailed list of the proper form of address for possibly every elected position conceivable. It also covers other dimensions of written correspondence, including aspects of form and structure, and many of the principles can be translated to email. While this book appears to no longer be in print, The New American Handbook of Letter Writing, by Mary A. De Vries, is available at Amazon.com.