Congressman Spam: Matt Gaetz of Florida

Twice a week, I receive a spam message from Congressman Gaetz. They are always boring.
They refer to some obscure bill he voted for. No one cares except donors who want him to vote for or against this bill. The average voter has no interest. Why should he?
The function of emails from a Congressman is not to provide information on his philosophy of government. It is not to report on the central issues he regards as the heart of his political life. The function of emails is this: to keep his name in front of voters in his district. This increases name recognition every other November. Nobody actually reads these emails, especially the Congressmen whose staffs send them.
Back in 1976, long before email, I wrote Congressman Ron Paul’s weekly newsletters. I wrote a two-pager every other week, and a four-pager every other week.
I tried to keep things interesting. In the four–pager, I always included a column: “Where your tax money goes, and goes, and goes….” This was a variation of Senator William Proxmire’s enormously successful monthly press releases, “The Golden Fleece Award.” His researcher would find some egregious waste of the government’s money. Then he would compose a humorous press release with Proxmire’s name on it. If that staffer did nothing else, he more than earned his salary and his free parking space. Wikipedia comments:
The Golden Fleece Award (1975 – 1988) was a tongue-in-cheek award given to public officials in the United States for their squandering of public money, its name sardonically purloined from the actual Order of the Golden Fleece, a prestigious chivalric award created in the late-15th Century, and a play on the transitive verb fleece, as in charging excessively for goods or services. United States Senator William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, began to issue the Golden Fleece Award in 1975 in monthly press releases. The Washington Post once referred to the award as “the most successful public relations device in politics today.” Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, referred to the award as being “as much a part of the Senate as quorum calls and filibusters.”

This post was published at Gary North on October 27, 2017.