Hi Middle America, do you like being played like a fiddle?

t r u t h o u t - Vincent Jauvert Secret History of a Reelection:

Take my privacy, please...

"With the Bush team, fishing for votes is no longer an art; it's a state-of-the-art technique. Jan van Lohuizen, recounts: 'In the swing states, we succeeded in reaching millions of Republican sympathizers, one by one, in a personalized way.' How? The operation, which mobilized all the best programmers, is unique in American political history. 'In America,' he explains, 'there are companies that specialize in collecting and selling information about individuals. It's entirely legal. They can supply an incredible amount of data about each person: the brand of their car, their income, their level of education, their favorite magazines, their favorite television programs, whether the person is a home owner or a renter, the number of telephone calls made abroad, the church a person goes to, their children's schools... Big firms like Visa constantly use this information for their advertising operations.' But no one had used it yet to get a president elected. 'We bought all the data about everyone (!) registered to vote,' Van Lohuizen explains. One important point: some citizens' party affiliation was known from these lists. We crunched all this information in our computers. That allowed us to identify about thirty different types of voter and then to imagine the most convincing arguments for each one of those types. Then all we had to do was classify each individual within those categories and send that person the corresponding message.' "