17th CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT PRECINCT COMMITTEEMAN MAIL-A-THON REPORT CARD

Without commenting on the merits of any candidate, I thought today would be a good day for a report card on their direct mail efforts. A nice lady committeeman lets me read her political mail. So, without further adieu (or "adon't") let's get to it:

BOLAND -- "B-" Frequency on the low side. Letters too long to read but well organized. No effort at geographic diversity;

HARE -- "C+" Letters too frequent. Every one of them requires a table of contents and an index. Tolstoy wrote shorter books than these letters. Ample grammos and typos. OTOH, excellent effort at showing support in all corners of the district.

MELLON -- "B+" Light on frequency but short, good optic attraction and white space. At least the reader will absorb his message on the way to the shredder.

SULLIVAN -- "B" Successfully fought the impulse to write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin. Trying to strike the right balance between being a pest (Hare) and being light on frequency (Mellon)

SCHWIEBERT -- "B-" What he has sent has been good but his frequency is off. Composition and brevity have been good. Not sure the QC paper endorsement was a good idea for a mailer to, say, Calhoun County.

Schwiebert and Sullivan could earn "A" grades overall for the semester with a tasteful and effective closing kick. Hare's grade could go up if he'd either just quit or if he'd obtain a proofreader who is actually a native English speaker.

From just the mailers, you can see that Hare's strategy is to make himself look inevitable and indistinguishable from Lane Evans. Schwiebert is appealing to the higher governance instincts of committeemen he doesn't know (always a bad idea--armtwisting and dealmaking are the universal language of central committees). Sullivan is trying establish a sense of neighborliness with the "out" counties. Mellon' just introducing himself. Boland has never settled on just one strategy. He sort of landed on "electability" early, then switched to "accomplished legislator", then switched to "partisan leader". In my opinion, he could have benefited by testimonials about what hard electoral worker he is. He has taken his very best asset and put it in about the fourth layer of his communication.

Anyhow, I love to review political direct mail, so keep those cards and letters coming, boys.