Phonebanking

I recently received an email from the Young Democrats at my university, enjoining members of the group to come out tomorrow night and help make campaign phone calls to other South Dakotans.

I do not, in principle, have a problem with this. I'm all in favor of getting out the vote and raising civic awareness, although sometimes I do wonder whether, instead of asking people to vote for their candidate, campaigners ought maybe to spend their time helping people and, y'know, giving people a reason to vote for their candidate instead.

What bothered me about this email was the following sentence: "Scripts will be provided so do not worry about not knowing enough about the candidates."

If you're going to make phone calls for a candidate, it seems to me you ought to know enough about that candidate to explain your support to someone else in words that aren't, "Well, she's a Democrat." (You can replace that with "Republican", "Libertarian", or whatever other party identification you like. The song remains the same.)