Trust Me, I'm an L.C.
In 1989, I wrote president George H.W. Bush a nice letter. I remember telling him how cool it was that the President of the United States had my same name!
Bush I wrote me a letter back and even sent me a signed photograph! I was so stoked that the President wrote me!
But that was 1989. Before e-mail. Before anthrax. Before citizens lost faith in government.
If I were born after Dennis Johnson wrote Congress Online, I would probably just sent the president an email. After all, the use of e-mail has increased almost 200 percent in less than 5 years! In 1999, there were 51 million e-mails sent to members of Congress. Now it is over 150 million.
So how does a member of Congress write back to his constituents?
They don't. (This burst my bubble when I found out H.W. Bush hadn't actually written me).
The glamorous job of responding to letters goes to a Legislative Correspondent or an LC as it is commonly referred to on the Hill. An LC is a fancy title for "letter writer," but it looks cool on a business card. House offices typically have one or two people who respond to constituent mail, but some Senate offices have up to 6 LC's.
To respond to the large volume of constituent mail, some members of Congress experimented with software that automatically filters out responses based on key words like "Social Security" or "Iraq." Ultimately, this software failed because members were worried that constituents had key pieces of their letters ignored.
Politicians are always worried about their next election. Suppose Joe Blow decides to write his Congressman X and gets a canned response about Immigration reform, when he wrote about his Immigration visa problems? Mr. Blow probably won't vote for Congressman X again, ever.
From that perspective, it's easy to see why that software failed.
After all, why trust an inhuman computer to sort letters, when you place your re-election hopes on a 23 year old college kid LC?
It sure fooled me in 1989.
4 Comments:
Well at least Congressmen have letter writers that maybe someday they will respond to you. Congressmen in Ecuador hardly pay attention to letters that people write to them. The other thing is that people hardly write to Congressmen. It is a waist of time. People in Ecuador feel betrayed. Politicians have harmed our country, so we are not interested in writing letters to them. Although, I believe writing to your Congressman is a positive way to enforce and demand a better job from them. But first we will have to start to believe again in politicians. I do not know if that is ever to happen again.
Believing in politicians is a major stumbling block. Public opinion for Members of Congress is at an all-time low (less than 38% approve of the job they are doing according to recent polls found on www.pollingreport.com).
Regardless of your political persuasion, Members of Congress on all levels need to do a better job of actually working on our behalf.
Sorry to learn about your bubble burst.
I'm so pleased to read your story about writing to the President and receiving a reply as a child. I have a similar story and was also disappointed when adulthood killed my idea that Reagan wrote me a personal response.
I have written elected officials many, many letters since, but that was by far the most important. It made me feel like a part of the Democratic process long before I was old enough to vote.
When our elected officials fail to answer constituent letters in a timely manner they further erode our Democracy by teaching children that their opinion is unimportant. When these kids are old enough to vote, they will already feel disenfranchised by the process.
By the time they learn it was a college intern and the autopen, they'll already be good citizens.
Each census leaves Members of Congress with a major increase in the number of citizens they must represent, because the number of representatives stays static. That just means more constituents to tend to, and more correspondence.
Email surge over the last 5 years has compounded the volume problem. Technology has to be the answer, because no one is going to double a Member of Congress's staff and space to allow them to more effectively respond. There are software programs that help the process.
I've never bought the argument that automatic sorting risks missing a sentence topic or paragraph that was key to the constituent's letter. Most offices risk human error by placing interns in the position of mail sorter anyway. Also, if there isn't a process in place to catch such an oversight before a response goes out the door, that certainly shouldn't be pinned on the sorting technology.
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