White House/AARP Spam

My wife, Helene, is one of an apparently quite large number of people who received a surprising, unsolicited, and hence disturbing email from David Axelrod attempting to extol the virtues of President Obama’s proposed health care health insurance reform, whatever it is at the moment. Like the other recipients, she wondered where the White House got her email address since she has visited no White House web sites.

Now, according to Fox News, the mystery is solved, sort of.

The White House for the first time Sunday seemed to acknowledge that people across the country received unsolicited e-mails from the administration last week about health care reform, suggesting the problem is with third-party groups that placed the recipients’ names on the distribution list.

In a written statement released exclusively to FOX News, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said the White House hopes those who received the e-mails without signing up for them were not “inconvenienced” by the messages.

“The White House e-mail list is made up of e-mail addresses obtained solely through the White House Web site. The White House doesn’t purchase, upload or merge from any other list, again, all e-mails come from the White House Web site as we have no interest in e-mailing anyone who does not want to receive an e-mail,” the statement said. “If an individual received the e-mail because someone else or a group signed them up or forwarded the e-mail, we hope they were not too inconvenienced.”

….

“We are implementing measures to make subscribing to e-mails clearer, including preventing advocacy organizations from signing people up to our lists without their permission when they deliver petition signatures and other messages on individuals’ behalf,” he said.

So, the culprits are those “advocacy organizations” who have forwarded names and email addresses to the White House without requests from or permission of the forwardees.

Very interesting, since the only “advocacy organization” with which Helene has been involved is the AARP, with which, in fact, she has been so involved rousing rabble on its web site that many of her posts and other submissions have been deleted, as have the posts of some co-rabble rousers there with whom she has organized several online groups. No doubt purely by co-incidence, many of her fellow AARP opponents of health whatever “reform” also received the White House/Axelrod spam email. Thus the AARP, it seems pretty clear, must have provided the White House with Helene’s email address as well as the addresses of some of her online associates there.

But wait. How could the AARP be an “advocacy organization” for the president’s proposed health reform (whatever it is) when the organization took the dramatic step recently of issuing a statement contradicting the president’s claim of AARP support for his policy?

Since the AARP, as all of its sentient members know, has in fact been supporting the president, perhaps he (make that He) can be excused for claiming its support. Whatever its leaders say for public consumption, it has certainly been acting like an “advocacy organization.” Whether or not its tax status allows for the sort of advocacy in which it has been both openly and surreptitiously engaged, its behavior has enraged many of its members … and created a large and growing number of former members.