The Crackpot Alarm

Darryl Pearce wrote the following in comments to an earlier post:

I've already sent my letter-to-the-editor for this month (they've been rationing me).

This got me thinking.

I work for a medium-sized newspaper (one coworker tells me it's actually the 96th largest paper in the U.S.). We seem to publish pretty much any halfway-well-written, halfway-civil letter we get. I imagine the same is true for most small- and mid-sized papers.

I've neglected the letter-to-the-editor as a part of my responsible-citizenship/change-the-world toolbox. That's kind of dumb. I can't send letters to the paper where I work, of course, but there are a handful of small papers here in Delco that would be pretty likely to publish an occasional letter. So, OK, time to start doing that.

But as Darryl notes, there's a balancing act as far as the frequency with which you can send such letters. My guess is the once-a-month standard his paper seems to have is pretty typical.

But my main question, as far as this sort of thing goes, isn't about letters to the editor. It's about letters to our members of Congress. These are letters I do send. I don't have to worry about them being too frequent to be published, but I do wonder how frequently I can get away with sending such letters without getting categorized as a tiresome crank.

If I send a single letter, or even a single letter per year, then my understanding is that Sens. Specter and Santorum and Rep. Weldon (all R-Pa.) will interpret these as representative letters. But if I started sending letters every day I imagine these would be color-coded and filed under "crackpot," and my opinions would be dismissed as representative of only me — a single obsessive and vaguely stalker-ish constituent whose vote they weren't going to get anyway.

So if we imagine some kind of curve graphing the frequency and potential efficacy of letters to Congress, there should be a point at which we can maximize the frequency of those letters without diminishing their impact with the suspicion of crackpotism.

So …

Any congressional aides or staffers out there who can give me the inside scoop? Is there a good rule of thumb we should know about here? How often can we get away with letters to Congress without setting off the crackpot alarm?