corrente

This whole "value voters" thing is, as I suspected all along, a crock. Religion is a subject that almost by definition engages the strong emotions and is therefore very satisfying to rant about. Numbers are cold, money is cold, organization is both cold AND boring, so we don't notice the stories like this:

(via Minneapolis Star-Tribune's Greg Gordon)

Business groups picked Ohio two years ago as the first place to fully deploy a new tactic for turning out Republican votes in the 2004 election.

Managers at more than 50,000 companies in Ohio urged employees to vote, while trying to coax them in e-mails to look at customized internal Web sites rating politicians' votes on business issues, a project leader said. One rating gave Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry a zero last year on votes affecting manufacturers.

Greg Casey, a former U.S. Senate sergeant-at-arms who headed what he calls business' "below-the-radar" national effort, said it resulted in 30 million electronic contacts with workers, about 700,000 the day before the election.

Casey believes that the "Prosperity Project" had a big impact in Ohio, citing research suggesting that for every 10 employees who scanned company Web sites, one was motivated to vote. He said Ohio companies made 1.3 million employee contacts, more than nine times Bush's 136,483-vote victory margin in the state.

Prosperity Project officials, however, say they are "respectful" to employees and merely offer them access to information affecting their companies' prospects in a tough global economy.

"At the end of the day," said Eric Burkland, president of the Ohio Manufacturers Association, if employees and companies "aren't working together, all those jobs are going to China."

Yeah baby! BOHICA time in Ohio! Work to your last waking hour, let us extract that last drop of blood before you drop, while we chop medical benefits first from retirees (they don't have that shit in China!) then from current employees (we gotta compete with China!) and then take your damn jobs to China anyway. Sorry about that but we have The Company's Best Interests To Consider.

I humbly request/arrogantly demand (pick one) that everybody go read this entire story. The Strib is registration but you can read one story per day without it, so go there, copy this, and save it for re-reading. I add just one more bit because it pertains to a company that operates nationwide, and which you might wish to reconsider your relationship with if you are a customer:

While many participating companies refuse to be identified publicly, Gordon Crow, director of government and community affairs for Schwan Food Co., said the frozen-food maker, based in Marshall, Minn., has operated a Prosperity Web site since 2002 and actively encouraged employees to vote.

Okay, just one more one more thing: You know how we here in the left part of blogland have been just a big smug about how we're the cutting edge of using the Net to good effect? Feh. We're schmucks. They were not only out there too, they were better targeted:

It turned out to be a bargain, costing less than $10 million this election cycle to gain participation from 800 to 1,000 businesses and trade associations, which in turn linked hundreds of thousands more corporate members to the system. Meanwhile, Democratic voter mobilization groups spent more than $100 million.

Yeah, this is apples v. oranges, comparing one part of the Great Noise Machine to the entirety of the Dem GOTV efforts. But look at those numbers again. This was just the rollout, the test-marketing project. Wonder why we had such unexpected trouble in the upper Midwest? It wasn't because the Lutherans suddenly became Rapturists.