NP: Phantom Helmsmen, Lessons Worth Learning

I've been inundated with Obama campaign e-mails ever since I first donated money to my Senator. A lot of these -- and the phone calls -- have been pretty geographically aware, asking me to travel to neighboring states and whatnot. The phone calls may even have been gender-aware, in that I think I've only been called by women. I've been joking about volunteering as a way to meet people. How did they know that? Is it that obvious?

Anyway, this weekend I got the first e-mail that purports to be ethnically aware, except that they got it wrong. The subject line reads "Call Irish American voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio," but what Catalist (the voter database and targeting software that Obama is using) doesn't know is that, while my name is spelled in the Irish variant, I'm not actually Irish. My Italian grandfather changed the "a" in "Castello" somewhere in the first half of the twentieth century.

It's an interesting data point on how the Democrats are using their donor list, though.