Telephone canvassing in the UK has a chequered history. There were a variety of comments about call centres ringing up prospective party supporters and annoying them at the last two elections, equally there has been criticism of parties using publicly funded lines to campaign. Is it unclear whether it works and on whom, it may be useful for firming up support but not for conversions.
But how about this for an alternative. Registered members of the Obama 'movement' can access a huge online database of names, addresses and numbers. They are then asked to ring some of these floating voters to convince them Obama and Biden are the men to run the country. I have no idea what the data protection issues are, if any, but the notion is simple: an endorsement from an ordinary member of the community is far more powerful as a persuasion tool than any piece of advertising or PR.
The Neighbour to Neighbour 'tool', introduced here on the Obama homepage, gives the activists all the resources they need: the data, a script, training opportunities, flyers for door-to-door distribution, and a reporting back function. This kind of thing used to happen a lot in the UK when parties had large bases of supporters. In the last 15 years I have only ever been contacted by Liberal Democrats using these devises (though not scripts), would this work, is it happening but is all hush hush?