ORANGE PARK, Fla.-- A local campaign volunteer is under fire for a controversial phone call she made to try to encourage voters to support Mitt Romney.
She told random voters statewide that the president is a Muslim who'll take away their medicare.
It's the final few weeks to get voters, and volunteers on both sides of the aisle are making a lot of calls.
But one person in Polk County received a message on his machine from a GOP volunteer in Clay County that surprised him. "Y'all sound like y'all are senior citizens right?...You don't want Obama. You really don't want Obama because he'll get rid of your Medicare. You might as well say goodbye to it....I don't know if you've done any research on Obama or not but he is a Muslim," said the volunteer.
That man sent the message to a community radio station in Tampa. Robert Lorei is the station's news/public affairs director. He played it for his viewers. "I've never heard anything like that before....The person who received the voicemail said he gets a lot of calls from volunteers asking him to vote for a certain candidate," said Lorei.
Back in Clay County, the county chair says the volunteer went off script. "The Clay County party is sorry it happened as well as the Romney campaign, but we don't condone that type of discussion," said chair Leslie Dougher.
But Dougher didn't condemn the comments. The caller also talked about her perception of President Obama's views on government. "Um he is um, got a socialistic view on the ya' know, economy, the government, the whole nine yards. If he had his way, we'd be a socialistic country," said the volunteer.
Dougher says while there was a supervisor on duty, he or she missed this unscripted message. "We have 25 volunteers come in and they're told to stick to the script and she did not," said Dougher.
The volunteer is still working with the Clay County GOP, but in a different capacity. We have reached out through emails and phone calls to the Democratic Party for their take on all of this. So far, they went unanswered.
