The Iowa Battleground

The Politico is reporting that there are automated push pulling phone calls being placed in Iowa in support of Huckabee. At least Fred, McCain and Rudy have been targets of the negative comments on the push poll--it is not known at this point if Mitt is included in these polls.

For each target, the pattern was the same -- a recorded message using voice recognition technology asked the recipient if they would participate in the caucuses, considered themselves pro-life and thought marriage should be between a man and a woman.

Then the dirt came, right after those called were asked which candidate they were backing.

For all three, the calls were phrased in the same manner: "If you knew that..."

At the end of the call was an invitation to go to www.trusthuckabee.com. While it claims to be an independent, grassroots effort, the join now link takes people to solicit precinct captains for the Iowa caucus. Jonathan Martin has done some good work trying to track down who is really at work here, but it is not clear yet.

The solution? Let's try to get the real, person to person contact going by participating in Fred's Phone for Fred program! Iowans will probably appreciate the more personal touch approach as compared to automated hit phone calls.

UPDATE: Marc Ambinder over at The Atlantic has made the next step in figuring this thing out:

An extension portion of the TrustHuckabee website is devoted to recruiting, signing up and training precinct captains.

But 504(c)4 groups cannot legally recruit precinct captains for an electoral contest, much less for a specific candidate. It's a soft money operation paying for a basic presidential campaign function, which some campaign finance lawyers might [sic]

Marc Continues:

An internal e-mail obtained by this column from a TrustHuckabee precinct captain states that the group plans to make 695,000 voter identification calls between November 5 and Dec. 5. Beginning today, three phone banks will call all identified Huckabee supporters to recruit captains for all 1,784 precincts.