Friday, 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.
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