Reply #8: Kerry Campaign Calls Went Through Canadian Call Center

[Dunvegan]

One of the Kerry campaign's call centers was found to be "out-of-country" in Canada. This would have made all the Kerry campaign's calls to voters via that Canadian call center "international" calls:

From Mother Jones:

http://www.mojones.com/news/dailymojo/2004/03/02_501.html

Karen Tumulty of Time magazine writes that, whatever the economics, the politics of the issue are treacherous:

Outsourcing is the ultimate nightmare issue for the White House, because it's a problem that every voter understands. It's extraordinarily difficult to solve—and impossible to solve in the short run," says Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, who was also Bill Clinton's chief domestic-policy adviser. And while Bush can blame many of the economy's woes on the vicissitudes of war, terrorism and corporate scandals, outsourcing is one problem that won't go away when those do.

But even as the Democrats denounce the phenomenon, the proposals they offer do little more than attack it at the margins. Kerry calls for a study to examine the problem and possible solutions. He would discourage outsourcing federal contracts and would require employees from outsourced call centers to identify their location so that consumers can respond to that information as they see fit. (His own campaign was embarrassed by a firm it had hired that was routing calls to Wisconsin voters through Canada.) North Carolina Senator John Edwards would also try a combination of browbeating and suasion: he would create a new Office for Corporate Responsibility at the Commerce Department to encourage companies to keep jobs here rather than outsourcing them.