Archive for October, 2008
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
A Hopeful Day in Dayton
Canvassing is an exhausting affair: hitting the road early in the cold morning, wandering through unknown neighborhoods, knocking on door after door and repeating the same speech about a thousand times.
Contrary to popular belief, most people are at the very least coutreous, regardless of their political views, but their reaction is often less than excited. We’re interupting their day-to-day life and, unlike me and many of my closest friends, politics isn’t something in which they’re particularly interested.
But then you run across people like Mattie, a 56-year-old woman who couldn’t wait to tell me that she was heading down the next morning to early vote for Barack Obama. “I’ve never voted before in my life,” she beamed. “But this year I couldn’t imagine not.”
And you have the chance to stop by community events, like the Sharks football team, which was selling delicious BBQ rib sandwiches out of a smoker at a major intersection. “We’re raising money to take our kids to the state championship,” their coach said, while agreeing to pass out early voting reminder flyers to any of the team’s customers.
The handful of Matties and the full belly of Sharks barbeque you run into over the course of a canvassing shift easily make up for the cold fingers and sore feet that are inevitable in such an affair.
John Kerry lost Ohio by about 9,000 votes — just nine votes per precinct. Our ground game is awesome and we’re going to shift the electoral landscape here in Dayton, across Ohio and then throughout the country. Change is coming.
One week to go.
• Email This PostFriday, October 24th, 2008
Day 2 in Dayton
It’s close the end of my second day in Dayton and. so far, the city has been both everything I expected and a complete surpise.
Having not spent a ton of time in the midwest, I came to Ohio expecting a post-industrial wasteland. Dayton has been home to a number of manufacturing plants over the past 20 years: GM and Delphi to name a couple, all of which are now defunct. Much of the city reflects this: a quiet downtown, shuttered businesses and homes with foreclosure signs offering themselves up for sale for the lowest cash price.
At the same time, the people I spoke with during my first four-hour, 70+ home canvass are some of the nicest peolpe I’ve ever run into — excited, pretty upbeat about the situation and hopeful that a change in administration will begin to turn the economy around. We have a huge canvass this weekend, so I’m eager to see if this small sample of Daytonians is representative of the larger whole.
Equally surprising, though maybe it shouldn’t be, is how split Dayton is as a city: rich
vs. poor, white vs. black, east side vs. west side, Obama vs. McCain. Yard signs serve as windows to passions of homeowners and quietly whisper the true challenge facing the next president: uniting the country and bringing together people who have fundamentally different belifs to find solutions acceptable to everyone.
And change is coming. The longer I am involved in the Obama campaign, the more clear it becomes to me that we have both the excitement and the ground game to knock this election out of the park. It’s the bottom of the ninth and we’re running for home here in Ohio.
11 Days to go.
• Email This PostWednesday, October 22nd, 2008
The Last 36 Hours
It’s amazing how quickly life can change. In just the last 36 hours:
- The economic crisis hit home as I was laid off from my year-and-a-half long gig directing organizing programs at YouthNoise. The organization, facing some tough economic times, cut back a number of staff members and cut the hours and pay of virtually everyone else. I’m honestly not sure who got the worse end of the deal, me and my fellow layoffees or the folks who are left behind, with twice as much work to do for 80 percent of the pay.
- I partied with the Bay Area parrothead population at a Jimmy Buffett concert in Mountain View. Not relevant to this story, per se, but it was a ton of fun and a few beers and a few margaritas help anyone forget about being laid off earlier that day.
- Attempted to apply for unemployment insurance from the State of California. Now in the mandatory week-long waiting period, I’m amazed at how I have an Ivy League graduate degree and still struggle with the unnecessarily complex process. Oh yeah, and don’t try to call the office: you get a nice message about there being too many callers (no kidding, have you stepped outside lately?) and then are disconnected and told to call back later.
- And I’m now sitting at the airport boarding a red-eye to Dayton, Ohio, where, with the help of some good friends, I landed a job for the next two weeks doing get out the vote efforts for the Obama campaign. While I’m not totally sure what lies ahead–other than lots of cold pizza and sore feet–I’m more excited than I’ve been in a very long time and ready to see what the presidential race looks like from a swing state.
- I’ll be writing new posts as often as I can, though they’ll probably be sans pictures, as I just realized I forgot the cable for my digital camera. (Argh! I hope I didn’t forget anything else important.)
In the meantime, take a look at this video about traveling to Ohio from the Obama campaign. It’s about all I have to go on for now:
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Friday, October 10th, 2008
Pete Cenedella: Ooh, That Smell: McCain and His Mob Waltz With Death
Shared by Trey
These recent rallies make me sick. I hope these vitriolic statements are truly the last, dying breath of the old guard and that the new guard–both Democrats and Republicans–can truly be respectful in their disagreements and work together to achieve the common good.
Shortly before death, bodies engage in a riot of convulsions and hemorrhages, some disturbingly visible, some internal and unseen. There is a dance of extreme violence that occurs in a living organism as it “rages against the dying of the light,” to paraphrase Dylan Thomas. And then, there is often a moment of calm as death sets in, and the organism relaxes its fierce grip on life. Endorphins flood the body and the grimacing mask of struggle, many times, goes slack. And then you die.
If you’ve ever been at someone’s dying bedside, you know what I mean.
It’s worth holding this imagery in mind when looking at the videos coming back from the campaign trail of recent McCain-Palin rallies. Of course the candidates have gone negative — that’s what candidates do when they have nothing worth saying. It’s not the negative paragraphs larded into the stump speeches that are so disconcerting about the footage we’re seeing. It’s the mob. And the tacit approval of the mob emanating from McCain himself.
Some lowlights: Several McCain supporters on their way into a rally in Pennsylvania actually call Obama a “terrorist,” and one answers the question “Why do you think he’s a terrorist?” with the retort “Look at the bloodlines. Look at his name.”
A voice clearly screams “Off with his head!” in reference to Obama when Sarah Palin hammers away at the Bill Ayers connection. Palin does nothing to discourage the call.
A questioner at one of McCain’s “Town Hall” rallies refers to Obama and Nancy Pelosi as the “socialists” who are “taking over our country.”
A line of McCain supporters on their way in to a rally in Ohio heckle the Obama supporters and journalists across the street with cries of “You need to go die” and “Commie faggots,” and several call Obama a terrorist, a socialist, a traitor, and more.
It’s easy to view this footage and feel panic welling up inside. Easy to feel that a tide is rising in the heartland of fear and anger, ignorance and violence, that is on the verge of flooding the ballot boxes and carrying John McCain and Sarah Palin to the White House.
What’s important to bear in mind is that these are hardly “swing voters.” These are the 19 percent of the country who might yet call themselves “Bush Republicans,” even after the verdict of history. Bush Republicans are not the concern, in the end. Reagan Democrats are. As McCain’s own former top strategist John Weaver was quoted as saying: “Please find me a swing voter, an undecided independent, or a torn female voter that finds an angry mob mentality attractive.”
What’s happening at these rallies is a series of convulsions and spasms no less primordial than those we make at the end of life — a kind of death dance. The death of John McCain, American Hero — who may be hearing plaudits from the pitchfork-wielding mob, but who is hearing nothing but disappointment and disapproval from those Republicans and Independents who once held him in such esteem. And in the throes of that death, McCain is waltzing with a dying breed of sad old white Americans, whose tragedy continues to be their belief that those who have fleeced them were their greatest friends, and those who might plausibly have their interests at heart politically are a bunch of commie faggots. These rallies smell of rot, the stench rising from these hollow crowds carries the odor of lynch mobs and blacklisters, Father Coughlin and the Silent Majority.
But no more are these folks a Silent Majority. They are a loud, vocal, ugly minority. They are literally a dying breed. And when we write their obituary in the next few years, there really won’t be a wet eye in the house.
Cue the Skynyrd: Ooh, that smell, can’t you smell that smell? The smell of death surrounds you.
What is terrifying about these images, these sounds, these ugly days, is not what might befall Barack Obama at the ballot box. It is that unthinkable thing that we all think about, that Palin and McCain are conjuring like a dark specter. The game McCain is playing is as real as Russian Roulette and might have the same outcome. David Gergen has warned on CNN that “real violence” could be the bitter fruit of these dark electoral arts. “There is a free-floating sort of whipping-around anger that could really lead to some violence. And I think we’re not far from that,” Gergen said. “I really worry when we get people — when you get the kind of rhetoric that you’re getting at these rallies now. I think it’s really imperative the candidates try to calm people down.”
The dire question that seems to be rising is this one: How many more crowds can McCain whip up this way and not expect to stumble on the loaded chamber?
