Normally, I don’t write about politicians, especially not US ones, but I have been so annoyed by Mitt Romney’s campaign that I am forced to write something. Over the last week I have been bombarded by phone calls paid for by his campaign, all of which are recorded messages with no option to get off the calling list, or to say that I have no interest (other than hanging up of course). I haven’t received a single phone call from any of the others in this year’s circus. So, this tells me two things:

• Mitt Romney is desperate; desperate enough to have all these different people record messages for him that he can then playback down my phone line without even bothering to find out if I’m interested;
• Like most US politicians, he also cares more about his own success than about anything else. To the point that he’s not even willing to listen to you – he just plays a recording down the phone line, with no option for giving feedback about how you feel, or to say you don’t want to hear from him again.

If you can’t even be bothered to ask the people you’re interrupting whether they’re interested before you play them the message, and you don’t provide them any means to be removed from the list of numbers they call, then you don’t deserve to even run for public office, letalone actually win.

And here’s a really simple bit of campaign reform that they could implement: no recorded calls, ever. And all callers must first ask whether the callee is interested in hearing the message, and whether they’d like to be removed from the calling list.

I’ve sent his campaign a question, through their web form, asking how to get off the list. We’ll see if I get any response; I’d be surprised, though the website did say “we will make every effort to respond to your message as thoroughly and quickly as possible” on the page after the submission.