The art of the political sting

What was incredible about the Jerky Boys wasn’t their ludicrous stories — a guy whose dog was stuck in a piano was one of the tamer ones — but how long their calls would last. The call-ee, usually a small businessman hoping to make a sale, would tolerate a lot of ridiculous, sometimes-offensive drivel before he finally hung up.

You could chalk it up to naiveté; that was clearly the point of the joke. But I always saw the Jerky Boys — and Borat, the faux Kazakhstani who mocked Middle America a few years ago — as proof of fundamental human goodness. We’re inclined to believe the best in people, to assume they’re who they say they are. We try to be congenial, no matter what we hear, in business or conversation.

So we’re all vulnerable to the latest wave of crank-call political activism.

Sometimes, crank calls are a literal thing: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker suffered mild embarrassment last month when a left-wing talk show host from Buffalo called him, pretending to be billionaire financier David Koch.

But there’s not much difference between a classic phone prankster and the work of conservative activists (and self-described investigative journalists) James O’Keefe and Lila Rose.

In 2009, O’Keefe posed as a pimp in offices of the community group ACORN, caught low-level employees on video offering advice on how to evade tax laws, and helped get the group stripped of federal funding. This winter, Rose released undercover videos of a fake pimp and prostitute seeking advice from Planned Parenthood.

And last week, two NPR executives lost their jobs after two members of O’Keefe’s group, posing as members of a nonexistent Muslim advocacy group, captured an NPR fund-raiser on tape calling Tea Party members racists.

Like the best crank-call artists, O’Keefe and Rose are good at self-promotion; their media blitzes have been stunningly effective. But their tapes reveal less about insidious hidden agendas than they do about the politesse that greases daily human interaction.

Imagine, for instance, that you’re a frontline Planned Parenthood employee, whose job is to advise people on delicate health issues. If a guy walks into the office and announces that he’s a pimp — which I’d wager doesn’t happen very often — do you jump up and issue a citizen’s arrest? Or do you listen, nod politely, and tell your supervisors afterward?

In most cases, the latter is precisely what happened. Some branches also contacted local authorities; the national office reported the “pimp’’ visits to the FBI. And in the one documented case where a Planned Parenthood employee offered the “pimp’’ illegal help, she was fired.

Whether NPR fund-raiser Ron Schiller deserved a similar fate is less clear. The condensed version of his meeting with O’Keefe’s pranksters, which swept the Internet last week, paints him as a guy on an anti-Tea Party crusade. But the full tape of the lunch meeting, also released by O’Keefe, offers a more complicated story. Schiller quoted top Republicans who criticized Tea Party members. He called Tea Party members racist only after one of the pranksters goaded him on. He also emphasized that donations wouldn’t affect news coverage. And his job was to raise money, which presumably means being very nice to people who might someday give it.

Clearly, Schiller could have vetted this group more carefully before his meeting. As someone high on the NPR food chain, he should have been more circumspect. If I were running a group that I knew was in someone’s political crosshairs, I’d train my staff — at every level — to be extremely suspicious nowadays.

But the idea that we should expect crank calls, and treat everyone as suspect, is a sad statement on our political climate. Maybe we shouldn’t tolerate troublesome statements of any kind. Maybe we should hang up the phone on anyone who seems strange. But until we’re ready to change some basic rules of interpersonal relations, we’d all better watch our mouths. And our backs.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com