George,

Mary Rodriguez suggests that I would not be offended by all the phone calls my wife and I have received at home from the Tingley campaign if I just "invite[d] Mr. Tingley to [my] house to meet a few of [my] neighbors and give them all a chance to know him."

She has it backwards. It's precisely because I've already had coffee with Mr. Tingley one-on-one and sat through a presentation he gave to about twenty individuals at a colleague's home (incidentally, I found him to be warm and self-deprecating if not all that well-informed about issues that are important to me) that I'm bothered by the alienating and impersonal contacts from his out-of-state political operatives.

Jeffrey Rossman (electronic mail, May 31, 2005)