Agency Creative Wants to Teach Congress to Read

Pledge Drive, Ad Effort Strive to Get Politicians to Actually Read Bills Before Voting

Posted by Ken Wheaton on 09.14.09 @ 04:38 PM

It would seem to be the most obvious law in the land (or at least common sense), that the chuckleheads toiling away in Congress would actually have to read bills before voting on them. It's the least we could expect for things that dictate our rights and spend kaschmillions of our tax dollars. Sadly, that's not the case. But Mark DiMassimo, CEO-creative director of DIGO/DiMassimo Goldstein, and Eric Yaverbaum, have launched something called ReadtoVote.org.

The simple mission is to "convince every member of the House and Senate to sign a 'ReadtoVote' pledge, agreeing never to vote on any bill before personally reading and understanding every word of it." Boy, good luck with that one! And I say this as someone who firmly believes this is probably the smartest pledge drive to hit the interwebs since the interwebs was invented.

DiMassimo and Yaverbaum were responsible for the earlier "Tappening" campaign (not to be confused with the Droga5 Tap project). This time around, they say they have a $750,000 marketing and advertising budget. Aside from the website, the first big stunt is recruiting 1,018 people to write the pages of America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 on the steps of the Capitol building, one page at a time.

Considering the bill changes on a daily basis and neither party really seems to know what's actually in it, that should be interesting.