When ACORN provocateur James OâKeefe and three accomplices were arrested at Sen. Mary Landrieuâs New Orleans office last week in the course of âmaliciously interfering with a telephone system operated and controlled by the United States of America,â according to an FBI affidavit, a lot of people wondered what it was about Mary Landrieu and her telephones that merited OâKeefeâs interest.
In a post on biggovernment.com on Friday and again on Sean Hannityâs Fox News show Monday night, OâKeefe said that his intent was to determine whether Landrieu was intentionally avoiding constituent phone calls during the late-2009 run-up to the Senate health reform vote. âI decided to investigate why a representative of the people would be out of touch with her constituents for âweeksâ because her phones were broken,â he wrote. âIn investigating this matter, we decided to visit Senator Landrieuâs district office â the peopleâs office â to ask the staff if their phones were working.â
OâKeefe wasnât the only one who had been investigating the matter. In fact, by the time he showed up in Landrieu’s office in late January, a couple of Louisiana political reporters had already examined the allegations that the senator had been ignoring her constituents. We spoke to two of them to find out why the Landrieu phone complaints never made the headlines in their respective newspapers.
Jonathan Tilove, who covers Lousianaâs congressional delegation for the New Orleans Times-Picayuneâs bureau in Washington, D.C., and who has since written about OâKeefeâs arrest, said complaints about Landrieuâs phones just didnât rise to the threshold of news, in his opinion. âThe story portrayed by OâKeefe was that there was some intention here not to hear from her constituents. I think the idea when everyone is calling a congressional office and theyâre not getting through is not surprising,â Tilove said.
Tilove readily admits he heard from plenty of readers who wanted to voice their opinion of the bill, but had trouble contacting Landrieuâs office. Landrieu had been on the fence about the health care bill and was buffeted with calls from all sides of the debate, Tilove explained. At first she had opposed a public option, and was targeted by public option supporters, he said. Then, several political action groups launched campaigns urging their supporters to tell Landrieu to vote against the bill. When, in late November, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh called Sen. Landrieu a high-priced prostitute for accepting $300 million in Medicaid benefits for Louisiana, in exchange for voting to allow the bill to go to the floor for debate, Landrieu was likely fielding calls from an even larger national audience. She was a âlightning rod,â he said.
Iâm not discounting that a lot of people were having trouble getting through to her, but when you are the focus of as much attention and effort to systematically get everyone to call youâbecause she was so prominently out there as a swing vote on this and because she went in a direction that was out of step with the majority opinion in her state and because a variety of ad campaigns were telling people to call her and tell her what you thinkâwhile I understand the frustration, Iâm not entirely surprised you would have trouble getting through.
The first media mention of any complaints about Landrieuâs phones can be traced back to a Dec. 23 article in the Baton Rouge Advocate by Mark Ballard, who covered a health care reform protest in front of Landrieuâs Baton Rouge office. In the story, Ballard quoted Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, one of the groups that organized the protest, who implied that Landrieu was being purposefully unreachable.
âWe were stunned to learn that so many phone calls to Sen. Landrieu have been unanswered and met with continuous busy signals. We asked them to call their senators. They could get through to Sen. Vitter, but not Sen. Landrieu,â Perkins told Ballard.
(Tilove points out that David Vitterâs vote was never in play, and therefore he wouldnât have received as many callsâand prompted as many busy signalsâas Landrieu. âVitterâs position on this was unambiguous and ironclad,â he said. âThere would be no comparison, and very few offices in the country were as much the subject of calling as hers.â)
Perkinsâs complaints didnât come as news to Ballard, either. In November, following Beck and Limbaughâs prostitute comments, Ballard received a spike of complaints from voters who couldnât reach Sen. Landrieu. To test the claims that Landrieu was unreachable, Ballard conducted an experiment. He randomly called Landrieuâs Washington, D.C., office at different times of day over the course of about a month, targeting the D.C. office because âwe want to talk to her directly if possible and avoid talking to flacks.â He usually got throughâand if he got a busy signal, he called back later and always got someone on the line, he said.
âWe checked on it and when we checked on it, we didnât have trouble getting through,â Ballard said. âWe had no special back-room numbers, we had to go through the front door the same way as everybody else. Doesnât mean there werenât these times you couldnât get through because of all the calls jamming the lines. But for the most part, we had no trouble.â
The one time he really couldnât get through at all, he said, was the day of the Family Research Council and Baton Rouge Tea Partyâs march on Landrieuâs Baton Rouge office, on Dec. 22, two days before the final health care vote in the Senate. âPresumably more people were calling that day because Tony Perkins was making such a to-do about it,â Ballard said.
So that day he had the Advocateâs Washington reporter, Gerald Shields, grab Landrieu for a comment after she gave a speech on the Senate floor.
Thatâs when Landrieu said âOur lines have been jammed for weeks and I apologize. But no amount of jamming is going to keep me from supporting a good work for Louisiana and the nation.â
Ballard conceded that Landrieuâs other offices could have been inundated with more calls than the D.C. number he had been testing. âMaybe they were calling the New Orleans office and they really did take the phone off the hook,â he said.
In the end, he saw the phone complaints as a non-story.
âIt just didnât ring true. If yâall donât call at the same time, youâre more likely to get through,â he said. âIf we found over several days we couldnât get through, then that would have been a story.â But they didnât, and so the story didnât have a lot of news value, in Ballardâs judgment.
âWhat would the lede be like?â he asked. ââFive people said they couldnât get through to Sen. Landrieuâs office and when we called we didnât have a problem and when we told the senator about the complaints she said, âGee, I donât know whyâ?â I canât really see where the story is.â
Alexandra Fenwick is an assistant editor at CJR.