E-Mail This Article to a Friend POLITICS ‘Honey, it’s Bill again’ BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

Last weekend Bill Clinton called my sister. Twice.

He wasn’t much of a conversationalist, however — the calls were prerecorded messages urging her and her husband to vote against the California gubernatorial recall on Tuesday. They live in San Francisco. They are both Democrats who vote in every election. Their phone rang a lot last weekend.

Prerecorded auto-dial messages — "robo calls," as political consultants call them — have become a big political get-out-the-vote tool. In addition to getting calls from the ex-president, my sister and her family heard from a near-president (Al Gore) and a candidate for president (Joe Lieberman), but no pretend president (perhaps robo Martin Sheen, a prominent Democrat, did not have her number). Lieberman’s call came Monday evening, within an hour after the end of Yom Kippur, my sister noted. Perhaps prerecorded Lieberman does not dial on the High Holidays?

And this being California, celebrities also called in with their opinions. Barbra Streisand made a robo call to my sister's house. Also Candice Bergen, speaking on behalf of Planned Parenthood.

All these calls were anti-recall, presumably targeting my sister and her husband from lists of Democrats. None of them, however, advocated a vote for Democratic candidate Cruz Bustamante. Apparently his campaign had too little money, celebrity endorsers, or hope of victory to run robo calls.

The Schwarzenegger campaign took advantage of its robot-playing candidate to conduct robo calls featuring the Terminator himself, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. My sister’s number apparently is not on his automatic dialer. Too bad; her kids probably would have gotten a kick out of hearing his voice on their answering machine. Bill Clinton’s voice, perhaps, doesn’t have quite the same effect.