There certainly have to be easier ways to score a VIP ticket to a political rally. Standing in the modest crowd of a few hundred who showed up downtown to hear Joe Biden on Friday morning was a shy, freckle-faced young woman wearing a white coat against the chill. She had received an invitation from the campaign the night before to be here. That's because Chaylee Cole, an 18-year-old student at Fairmont State University, has become a celebrity of sorts. Last week, she was fired from her part-time job as a telemarketer when she refused to make telephone calls attacking Barack Obama for his association with former Weather Underground leader William Ayers.
Hear the Ayers phone call, as well as other robo-calls from the 2008 campaign, here:
Cole told me she had been working at the Weston, W.V., office of the Philadelphia-based firm, 1.2.1 Direct Response, for a few months to make money for school, mostly selling cable packages. (As it happens, Obama himself had done the same thing during one school year at Columbia University, selling New York Times subscriptions over the phone.) When she saw the anti-Obama script, which linked Obama to bombings at the Pentagon and the Capitol, it bothered her.
According to the Charleston, W.Va., Gazette, which first reported on her firing, the script told callers to say:
"Hello, I'm calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the US Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home, and killed Americans.
"And Democrats will enact an extreme leftist agenda if they take control of Washington. Barack Obama and his Democrat allies lack the judgment to lead our country.
"This call was paid for by McCain-Palin 2008 and the Republican National Committee."
Cole insists that her decision about the call wasn't about politics. "I was uncomfortable reading it," she says. "I didn't know if it was true. I wouldn't have done it if it was anti-McCain either. Everything about it was wrong." She told the Charleston newspaper that she was also worried about the fact that she didn't know who might be answering the phone when she called, and was especially concerned that she might be delivering her message to a child or an elderly person. Her bosses gave her a choice, she said: Read it, or go home-without pay.
Cole isn't the only telemarketer who refused to deliver the attack call, which has been made in several battleground states. Ted Zoromski of Middleton, Wisconsin, quit his job at a Madison firm rather than make the call. And some leading members of McCain's own party up for reelection, including Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Gordon Smith of Oregon, have called on McCain and the RNC to stop the robocalls.
Such negative telephone campaigns — often in the guise of automated "robocalls" — are a time-honored campaign tactic, especially in the closing days of a campaign, because they can often go under the radar. However, the Obama campaign has increasingly been crying foul on the McCain calls, and this week, launched a new website, radar.barackobama.com that actually aims to draw attention to, and thereby discredit, them.
For Cole, a young woman who is preparing to cast her very first vote-and who still won't disclose who it will be for — it was a rough introduction to modern campaign tactics. At the rally, Biden lauded her from the podium, and declared: "Our country cannot take four more years of this divisive politics." But for her part, Cole seemed like she would have been just as happy not to play her bit part in this election season. "It seems pretty nasty," she told me, and added: "I'm too young for all this."