Entries tagged 'Barack Obama'

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.

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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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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

The Last 36 Hours

It’s amazing how quickly life can change. In just the last 36 hours:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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, August 22nd, 2008

An American Prayer

While the McCain camp tries to brandish the term “celebrity” against Barack Obama as a pejorative, true celebrities are showing their commitment to the cause.

The video above is just the latest supporter-produced video to go viral. Co-written by British songwriter Dave Stewart and U2’s Bono, the video features celebrities Forest Whitaker, Jason Alexander, Whoopi Goldberg, Cyndi Lauper, Barry Manilow, Joan Baez, Macy Gray and Joss Stone alongside regular Americans.

This part of Stewart’s written introduction to the song is particularly powerful:

This video isn’t so much an endorsement of Barack Obama as much as it is a celebration of all those who have picked up a sign, who have registered to vote and are working to make the world a better place. So as Senator Barack Obama ascends to the mountain top, let us not forget all of the others who for the past 40 years have sung anthems of change to make this moment possible.

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