The Blinking Yellow Phone

It was the end of Tuesday afternoon, a week before the election, and my nerves were shot. I had been manning the front desk all day long, and felt like nothing so much as a thumb in a dam. Volunteers had been racing in and out, moving bags and boxes and boxes and bags. There were phone calls made, data was entered, and many sign-seeking supporters were turned away empty-handed. I had been attempting to make 25 phone calls for the last few hours, but I could never get through more than two before a new emergency reared its ugly mug. I was ready to call it quits, to collapse on the first available surface. Wednesday was my day off, my sole opportunity to wage my one-man campaign against my own unemployment. It was 4:20, I leave at 4:30, and I was itching to be out of the roadside fishbowl that is our office. Ten short minutes till freedom. Then in stormed Toni. 

Toni is a large woman, and she was pissed. Not pissed with me, I’m relieved to say, but she was a woman on a mission, and I was either with her or with the terrorists (which is what she calls Republicans). Looking up from my desk, seeing her headed towards me like a lioness in mid-charge, I almost got up and fled like a frightened wildebeest. Yet I sat my ground, smiled at her, and asked her if there was any way in which I might be of service?

“Yes”, she said, “I need to get a message to Obama!”

“Of course!”, I replied, reaching for the key I keep chained around my neck. I used it to open the locked box on the wall, and extracted a blinking yellow phone. 

Into the phone I shouted, “Obama? It’s Dan! There’s a woman wants to speak with you!”

“Now put her on Dan”, soothed the POTUS. “Let’s get this situation sorted out.”

What a guy.

Unfortunately, that is not true. I have no key around my neck, there is no blinking yellow phone, and Obama has not accepted my phone calls since our salad days in Chicago. Toni, however, was quite real and quite pissed. She was extremely disturbed by the rumors of Tagg Romney’s connection to a manufacturer of Ohio voting machines. She wanted no part of my lukewarm reassurances. She wanted action. I passed the buck. My lovely supervisor came over, comforted her, gave her the facts as they stand, and encouraged her to turn her fervor towards campaigning. I stood up and exited quietly, while Toni cooled down like a shut-off reactor.

Saturday evening: I was drained out and done in. Darkness had long since fallen on a productive day, but I had a few hours left before escape. The door opened. In walked Toni. She wasn’t yelling and she wasn’t angry, but she did take a packet of phone numbers, hunker down in a cubicle, and call 102 people, calmly and articulately explaining her reasons for supporting President Obama.

I’ve got a dozen stories just like that one. On the Saturday before election I sent a bunch of volunteers out to knock on doors in Aston. One of them came back and said that he’d spoken with a young man, originally from Niger, who was interested in volunteering with the campaign. Abdul was his name. I called Abdul, and by noon on Sunday he was on the streets, talking to undecideds, getting out the vote, doing the little, annoying things that win elections. When he came back with his completed canvassing packet, I wanted to ask him a dozen questions: who are you? What’s your story? Why do you care about this? But there wasn’t enough time, and he was gone.

There was David, a quiet, unassuming man who had been working with me from the start. We were originally going to run our Get Out The Vote (henceforth GOTV) operations from his house. When that fell through we found an office in the hinterlands of Media, and I started talking to David about helping me run the office. He was amenable, but tepidly so. Finally he came out and said that while he’d be happy to help any way that he could, he was also an excellent and experienced canvasser, and that, if push came to shove, “let’s take the Ferrari out of the barn and win this fucking thing.” I’d never heard him put that many words together, let alone say “fuck” or refer to himself as an Italian sports car. When GOTV arrived, he knocked on 250 doors in 3 days. That’s a lot, and it was cold.

Kucz, who responded, not to the offer of pie, but to a friend in need, and who came out to help me on a cold Sunday in the middle of nowhere. I gave him a packet, sent him out into the heartland, and he banged it out like a champ. He even knocked on the door with the sign reading, “We have pit bulls and we don’t call 911, stay out.” I assured him that once those dogs found out about Barack Obama’s plan to save the middle class, they’d be all too happy to see him. What is happening to me?

Samantha, an undergraduate at Neumann University who volunteered to help before I got kicked off the campus. She was supposed to go canvassing with 4 other students. When they flaked out, she bundled up and went off on her own, knocking doors until it was dark, then waiting patiently for me to find her a freaking ride back home. She never complained, she wasn’t nervous, and she got the job done.

Kelsey, my lady friend, who has put up with my shenanigans enough for two lifetimes, but who was still nice enough to come with me to set up the office on Saturday. Who then came back Sunday because I was short on people, and she wouldn’t let me face the craziness alone. Who then came back Monday...even though she hadn’t planned on it, because she missed “having people yell at me” on the phone. Who came back again on Tuesday, again unplanned, and helped me finish the thing, then pack up the office. Who shed a tear with me when CNN called the election at 11:20, when we realized that we were part of a group of passionate, dedicated people who had gotten out their vote and won an election. 

And finally, Fred. Fred is not his real name. Fred is from Iran, and while every part of me is itching to know his personal history, he carries himself with too much dignity for me to pry. I met Fred two months ago. He is a professor of systems engineering, but he never seems to be in a rush. I recruited him on the phone, he came in, and we got to talking. He started volunteering every Monday night on the phones. He is flawless. He talks slow, with a subtle but distinct accent. He listens to people. He reasons with them, laughs with them, and he is unhurried, genuine. He is also shockingly effective. Every time I talk with him he asks me what I think, and we discuss politics, social science, unafraid to disagree. People talk about voting as a privilege, about elections being blessings. I’m sure that Fred could write a book. When Tuesday night was over, when the gig was up and people started home, I said goodbye to him for the last time, surprised at how much I was going to miss him.

The social science behind our operation is simple: people want connections. Lawn signs, robo-calls, bumper stickers, and door-hangers are almost completely ineffectual. Phone calls are somewhat effective, but become nuisances. What is truly effective is one-on-one personal interaction. This is why we have offices, and this is why we knock on doors. It is so that people can volunteer with us and support our candidate, and in doing so feel like they are part of a community, that they belong. It’s manipulative to a degree, but since everybody gets what they want in the end, there isn’t much complaining. The only problem is that at the end, after those connections have been made, it’s over. Nice job. You too. See you in four years. Count on it.

Eventually Kelsey and I made it home on Election Night, around one in the morning. When we woke up the next day I was reminded of an old West Wing line: “I lost, I had a drink, I took a shower. When I win? Two drinks.” My first foray into politics was over. That was all she wrote.

However, I would be remiss if I didn’t look at the big picture, just for a second. Barack Obama was victorious, and he faces many challenges. Mario Cuomo said that “you campaign in poetry and govern in prose”. The poetry is over for our President. No more style, only substance. That’s what he wanted, that’s what he’s earned. Yet 47.8 percent of the country cast a vote for Mitt Romney. He raised over a billion dollars, some of that from ridiculously wealthy people, but much of it from middle-class men and women who believe in what he stood for. Finally, he had thousands and thousands of volunteers working to get him elected. All of those people have absolutely nothing to show for their efforts. This, to my view, is a problem. The electoral college is a problem. Winner-take-all elections are a problem. 

Our system of government forces us to choose between these two mega-parties. Because the loser in any national election gets nothing, there is nothing to be gained from starting a third party. Do you really think that the Super PAC billionaires and the Tea Party want to be under one tent? Of course not. Do you believe that Democratic unions and liberal environmentalists share the same vision for the future? No! Yet dividing up one party promises nothing except victory for the other, so instead of candidates who can speak firmly and truthfully about their beliefs, we have candidates who must, out of necessity, try to appeal to everybody. As a direct result, they appeal to nobody. Other countries have systems in which multiple parties can exist, who then must create a coalition. It is more unpredictable, it is crazier, but it is also more honest. I don’t know that America will ever embrace a system like that. But I think that it should.

I watched the results pour in on Election Night from the Radnor Hotel. I arrived thinking it was a party for the Collar-Counties Obama staff. In reality, it was a conference room rented for the George Badey victory party. Only there was no victory. Not long after I had arrived, right after CNN had called Pennsylvania for Obama and our little corner had gone bananas, George Badey walked in. I have met him several times. He was running for Congress in the 7th District, which has been gerrymandered so as to be nigh on impossible for a Democrat to compete. George walked by us, sitting on the floor, sipping our drinks. He looked shell-shocked. We stood up. We put down our drinks. Amid the flashing of cameras George began to speak. 

Three words into his remarks, I realized that I was watching a concession speech. The Obama staff next to me began to cry. While CNN silently carried on behind him, broadcasting the beginnings of a national victory, George conceded a much more personal defeat. He had worked hard; I knew it as well as any. He had gone up and down the district, knocking on doors, talking with people, engaged and excited by what he had to offer. It wasn’t enough. He had, by all accounts, debated the pants off his opponent on two occasions. It wasn’t enough. He had come out to Aston to shake hands with me and the volunteers, to take pictures with us and hand out his literature. It simply was not enough. It’s a democracy. The people are free to choose, and they chose the other guy.

George spoke well. He talked about how everyone had looked at the re-drawn district and declared it impossible. He spoke about exceeded expectations and hope and belief and fight. He discussed his opponent, and his sincere and fervent wish to see him, and all of Congress, succeed in moving our nation forward. And lastly, he spoke with great pride about his campaign, about how he and his opponent had avoided the venom and swill that characterize modern politics. He had run the campaign that he wanted to run, and the results were what they were, and he could live with that. He reminded me of Robert Byrd’s cardinal rule of politics, which I have kept always in mind, and with which I close this blog:

“Do not run a campaign that would embarrass your mother”.

Amen to that. See you in four years.

Do-Goodering

         I happened to be sitting at the front desk Tuesday morning when Gil Spencer walked in our office. He was well-dressed, reasonably hip, and unhurried (most newcomers treat our office like the dentist’s office: necessary, but not a place to linger). He announced himself as a reporter from the Delaware County Daily Times, and asked to speak to someone. While waiting for an official response, he and I made small talk. Meanwhile, the volunteers behind me had been about to start a full-team meeting. Upon hearing the words “reporter” and “Delco Times”, a fire-drill broke out quietly. When I turned around again, the team was gone. All they had left were their tumbleweeds.

My supervisor stayed behind, but she had suddenly performed her very best clam impersonation; unwilling and seemingly unable to speak. She gestured to me and I procured Mr. Spencer a chair, then went back into the rear of our office. My boss is not, as it turns out, allowed to speak with the press (a directive that she carried out with gusto. I half-expected her to duct-tape her own mouth shut until I realized we were out of duct tape.) She was uncertain how much courtesy to extend to our new journalist friend. A call was made, a press secretary contacted, and, bingo-bango, yours truly was given to the man, thrown like a piece of meat to the one-man horde.

What did I do in the office? Where was I from? How did I get here? Oh, really? Africa? What projects did I do there? How did I like the Peace Corps? Comfortable questions, all of them, designed to let me relax and give our man the necessary background. How did I think the debate went? I didn’t watch it. What were you doing? Playing basketball. How’s your game? Atrocious. Two years away from a court will do that.

There were some obvious pitfalls. He wanted to know what I thought of an Obama ad in Ohio which criticized Bain Capital and ended by saying “Mitt Romney isn’t one of us.” I’ve never seen the ad. The intent of his question was clear: either I was a soldier in a class war or I didn't believe in Obama’s message. I chose neither, and declined to comment. He pushed for an answer, and did not get one. It was at this moment that I began making comparisons to Rita Skeeter. 

We went on. He asked me about the economy. I am not an expert on economic policy, but I replied the best I could. He asked me about decreased family income. I answered by talking about General Motors (see kids, it’s just like the real debates). Why do I support Obama? Wow. Lots of answers to that, but when you’re asked the question, the mind has a way of going completely blank. Well, not completely blank. Apparently I was still able to recall West Wing quotes, word for word: “government can be a place where people come together and no one gets left behind.” (PUT LINK). Thank you, Aaron Sorkin. 

I’m an idiot.

Gil Spencer is not an idiot. He is obviously a sharp, experienced reporter, with the irreverent charm of an unapologetic scoundrel, and I very much enjoyed speaking with him. He openly outed himself as “a right-wing kook” (a fact I later verified by reading his past columns), assured me that I would not regret speaking with him, and at the conclusion of the interview we parted amicably. He called me later that day to double-check a few facts, and informed me that I would be making an appearance in Wednesday’s paper. 

So it was that I found myself on Page 6 of the October 24 issue of the Delco Times, profiled under a headline that read, 

“Obama volunteer helps rebuilding at home”. 

The bottom story on the page was “Wayne man waives hearing on child pornography raps”. 

Look, Mom, I’m a star.

In the days afterward, volunteers at the office came up to let me know that they thought I had done a splendid job with the interview. Apparently Gil has earned himself the enmity of local Democrats, and they were pleased I escaped with my metaphorical pants on. At the same time, via Facebook and phone calls, my friends weighed in to let me know they thought it was an equivocating piece of swill.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle. I really appreciated his comments about me greeting potential volunteers warmly. If there’s anything I try to do in this job, it is treat people kindly. Gil also represented my views on policy accurately, namely that the conditions which created this mess are the ones that Mitt Romney seeks to reimpose. Finally, I believe his closing line, that “Teach for America could do a lot worse”, was meant kindly, despite its somewhat stingy phrasing. For all of that I thank him.

I wish, and I expressed this wish, that he could have written a profile of the volunteers who have been working in this office for 6 months, every day, non-stop. His response? “You’re the first person I talked to.” I get it: deadlines exist and there isn’t always time to flesh out a story with multiple interviews. Still, the “you’re the first person I talked to” seemed indicative. Getting the story done appeared to be the goal. Getting it done accurately would seem to have been an unsought bonus.

Gil has certainly mastered the dubious art of the backhanded compliment. At one point in the piece he summed up Dan Waldron, Jobless Mooch, with effortless aplomb: “Dan is 27 years old and not currently employed, so he has plenty of time to volunteer.” 

        Alas, too true.

He mixed praise with polite derision: first he wrote that I am a well-informed Obama supporter, but he immediately contradicted himself, writing, “at the very least he knows the talking points well.” My Peace Corps service, apparently, was Plan B when my “acting career didn’t take off”. He also assured the readers that, though I studied drama, “he’s no drama queen”. Funny, I don’t think anybody thought I was.

Two lines in the profile really jump out: first, Gil said that he enjoyed speaking with Obama volunteers, but that he also enjoys speaking with Jehovah’s Witnesses. “They, too”, he writes, “mean well.” Second, in regards to my Peace Corps service, he writes, “if that sounds like something straight out of the American Liberal Do-Gooder Handbook, Dan can live with that. He loved Africa.”

I can live with the personal jabs. My current situation is certainly...well, if it’s not pathetic, then at least it’s pretty funny. But there’s something going on here that’s worth talking about. Gil’s objective, expressed in the beginning of his piece and proved throughout using me, is to conflate Obama supporters with Jehovah’s Witnesses, with nonsensical “do-gooders”. The idea being that Obama volunteers all mean well, but then, so do puppies. 

Where to start? For me, the obvious question is, what does he believe Mitt Romney’s volunteers are doing? They are giving freely of their time: making phone calls, knocking on doors, and not spending time with their families. Are they not attempting to do good? I would also ask what he thinks of Mr. Willard Romney himself: The man is spending huge amounts of his own money to seek a thankless office. In the past he has donated large chunks of his own time and fortune to support his church and its efforts to do what? Good. Mitt Romney might have far more in common with those Jehovah’s Witnesses than any volunteers who have spoken with our dear Gil Spencer, and I mean that as a compliment.

Still, that’s all malarky, hokum, shenanigans. It’s arguing the reasoning, not the actual hypothesis being put forth. I sat down, got out my Do-Gooder Handbook, and wrote a passionate defense of “do-gooding”. However when I finished I realized that my mother had done much better. Here are her thoughts regarding Gil’s work, with which I could not possibly agree more:

“Enjoyed reading it. The author does seem to regard volunteers - people willingly doing hard work for someone or something beyond their own immediate benefit - as amusingly inferior beings. The hackneyed phrase ‘Do-Gooder’ discounts any actual good that is done, and smugly derides the attempt as unworthwhile. His loss.”

I strongly disagree with Mitt Romney, and his supporters. I disagree with them on taxes, foreign policy, health care, gay marriage, you name it. I think they’re wrong, and they would put this nation in an untenable position. But they are doing their very best to do good for their country, and for that I applaud them. The volunteers whom I work alongside with are likewise trying to improve America, and I love them. We are a country facing a legion of problems, and if any of them are going to be solved in our lifetimes, they will only be solved by do-gooders.

Mitt Romney is absolutely one of us, Gil. Are you?

Zeb Towne for America

Beth Alois, George Badey, Mitt Romney, Patricia Worrell. Demarco, Bonner, Killion, Obama. Their names scroll by my window on the way to work, imprinted on 2’x1’ placards, secured to the ground by thin, flimsy stakes. The names jump out at me from their square little pieces of real estate. There is a strikingly similar taste in colors: white, blue and red seem to carry the day. Stars are omnipresent, and a variety of legislative positions seem to accompany these names: State Senator, State Congresswoman, Auditor General, Dogcatcher. Lots of jobs, which lots of people seem to want. Reminds me of the Gore Vidal line: “Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.” I wonder if that applies to Dogcatchers? (for those playing the home game, Duxbury, Vermont still elects its dog catchers. The incumbent is Zeb Towne. Good on ya Zeb.)

Lawn signs. The world wants them. Specifically, the world wants lawn signs with the names of Misters Obama and Biden affixed upon them. The wold wants ‘em, and we ain’t got ‘em. Which is good, because every effective blog is built upon conflict.

On an average day 11 people will come into our office looking for lawn signs that do not exist. As I write this it is 10:07am, and we have already turned away two people. After these junkies find that their free-standing fix cannot be scored in this particular place on this particular day, they tend to get a bit scratchy in my general direction. We (the couple of volunteers and paid staff that actually run the office) have been told that we are “dumb”, “stupid”, and “idiots”. We have committed a “huge mistake” and are “punting the election”. As always, crucial to remember: this is not the opposition. These are our supporters. 

Pennsylvania is a battleground state, worth 20 electoral votes. Now I am not saying that President Obama or Governor Romney would kill a homeless vagrant for 20 electoral votes (that’s what interns are for). But they don’t call them swinger states for nothing: whoever they go home with ends up in the fancy house. The stakes are sky-high, and a relatively small number of people will determine this election. Pennsylvanians are used to being courted. They are used to lawn sign wars; presidential candidates fighting for their territory as if it covered untapped oil. That’s how it’s always been. Campaigns don’t just give away lawn signs, they beg for space on your grass knolls. And that is exactly what Mitt Romney’s campaign has done. If there’s one thing the Republican Party knows, it’s two-dimensional proxies (couldn’t resist). But in the eyes of many Pennsylvanians, two dimensions is better than none. Barack Obama, leader of the free world, is a shocking no-show in the lawn sign derby.

There are reasons for this, of course. Smart people didn’t just decide that they wanted to lose an election. The decision was made to not give out lawn signs; to channel funds and time into phones, printers, staff, and offices. These are the things that comprise our “ground game”. These are the tools we will use to wring every last potential vote out of the electorate in the Keystone State. Smart, experienced people decided that in the dollars-to-votes equation, lawn signs were spectacularly inefficient. For whatever it is worth, I agree with them.

Lawn signs can’t vote. That is the premise of a splendid, snarky piece written about lawn signs. It highlights the main problem with using lawn signs: they devour time. Each lawn sign consumes, on average, three man-hours from the campaign. This time is spent ordering, waiting for deliveries, sorting, then delivering to the public. And once you’ve got them in the ground, you have about two days before some punk kid rips all of them out of the ground (on a brisk night in 2003, myself and two friends uprooted 13 lawn signs in an attempt to influence an election. Thus began my political activism).  All that volunteer-time could be spent canvassing or phone-banking; producing actual connections with actual voters and communicating a personal message, not a name and a slogan. 

In their defense, their have been studies showing that lawn signs can increase name recognition. This relies on the fact that when John Q Public goes into the voting booth and knows nothing, he’ll vote for the guy he’s heard of before. Couple of things wrong with that, but no matter which way you slice it, it makes no difference for our campaign. The candidate I work for is the President. People know him. He’s kind of a big deal. The mantra is repeated again and again throughout the article, “yard signs don’t vote”. 

I can mock and I can laugh, but really, people take this seriously. Democrats all over the whole state are deeply upset. The refrains are similar, and strikingly personal. People talk about living in “enemy territory”. I’ve heard people describe, time after time, how disheartening it is to see their street covered in Romney/Ryan signage, with nary a Team Blue banner to be seen. They feel isolated, even abandoned. You think I’m joking. I’m not joking. They feel forgotten and betrayed, and they don’t understand why. 

What makes people feel this strongly about some flimsy emblems? I’m not entirely sure. It seems obvious to me that anyone who wants a lawn sign must be firm in their conviction about their candidate; I don’t think people are auctioning their vote off for merchandise (though that would be funny). So they know who they are voting for. Are they worried about potential independents? I don’t think so. The appeals are almost always personal in nature. None of them have yet explained how they think these signs are going to win us new votes. Rather, they seem preoccupied with ‘their’ neighborhood, ‘their’ territory. 

My final piece of evidence: as per policy, whenever someone comes in requesting a lawn sign, I explain that we have none. Some people understand, some are frustrated. But before I let them leave, I make sure to ask if they are interested in volunteering. Every single one has said no. Not only have they said no, they reminded me of myself trying to escape an ex-girlfriend: backing away slowly, eyes searching for an exit, prepared to create a person-sized hole in the wall should it come to that. 

I get it. There are so many legitimate reasons not to come in and volunteer: kids, parents, illness, busy. And let’s face it: this is not thrilling work. But I also see enough people drag themselves in after work, enough parents who bring their kids, and enough adults who bring their parents. Why are these freaking signs so important to people who don’t care enough about the campaign to actually work for it? If you’re in, then you should be in. 

Truth is, not everybody wants to be in. Campaigning is a dirty, unattractive business, and a lot of people want nothing to do with it, and I respect that. Phone-calling, canvassing, these things are intangible. A sign, that you can hold in your hand. Lawn signs, bumper stickers, lapel pins, these are ways of showing support without actually supporting anything. If you believe in the aims of a candidate, if you truly think that they can improve our country, then doesn’t it come down to looking good or doing good?  These signs and symbols are only powerful because they represent a group of committed people who are trying to change the world for the better. Otherwise they’re just litter.

To conclude I will do the only sensible thing: blame the candidates. Barack Obama asked people to believe in him, an inexperienced freshman senator from Illinois and Hawaii and Kenya. He stood in front of a nation and implored us to summon our better angels, to choose a different, harder path. And we did. People bought in. People took the plunge. They chose to believe. Four years later, the affection goes only one way. Many people still believe in and love this President. They want to show that support on their very own lawns. But the campaign doesn’t support them. It doesn’t care about their lawns, it cares about their votes. This is not just the Obama campaign. All campaigns ask voters to fall in love with their candidate, knowing that the candidate will never fall in love with the voters. That works the first time around. Then eventually, people begin to wonder, what exactly is my relationship to this man/woman? How can I have a stake in them without a sign to put on it? The idea behind campaign organizing is to get people invested in their country's, their community's future. We’re asking for support: thankless, banner-less support. Or, as I believe it’s normally called, faith. 

J'accuse, Big Bird!

        On the western edge of Media, Pennsylvania, there is an old car dealership. It sits next to Baltimore Pike like a November jack-o-lantern: waiting to decompose or to be smashed against a wall, whichever comes first.  The last Oldsmobile rode out the door some years ago, and the place has clearly seen better days: the paint job peels, the ceiling leaks, the bathroom lighting resembles a prison movie. Some might see the place as a sad symbol of an increasingly virtual America. I see it as a building that has outlived this life and is merely waiting to start the next one. 

But this abandoned property is not vacant. Oh no. It has been occupied by the most patriotic of squatters. Here we are, Team Blue. We’ve called the band back together for its quadrennial reunion tour. It’s like any road tour: people are tired, people are cranky, it seems never-ending, and some nights are better than others. Welcome, my friends, to the show that never ends.

Monday night. Phone-banking. My boss has taken the night off, with the convenient (and accurate) reasoning that I need some experience running a phone-bank by myself. I’m here with Jean, a veteran of many past campaigns (and many future ones, by the look of it. She seems ageless). We greet volunteers, many of whom I’ve recruited myself in the last few weeks. We give them packets of voters to call, exchange some small talk, and give them a phone. I cross my fingers and hope that people pick up. Max Weber said that politics is “the strong and slow boring of hard boards.” Our phones are our drills, and tonight we bore a little deeper. It’s boring, this boring, but it is also important. On their way out I thank each volunteer at least twice. They deserve it. We leave the office later than we planned. I’ve been here 12 hours, but some volunteers just do not want to leave. I think they enjoy the company of like-minded folk. Or maybe just the company, period. 

Tuesday morning, 10am. The news comes in: a district judge has suspended the enforcement of Pennsylvania’s Voter ID law. You don’t need a photo ID to vote. This is a huge victory: a law that was put in place specifically to deliver a state to the Republicans is out of the picture. We hug each other. We yell. People are making phone calls with their fists raised in the air. Cars beep going by (though that could be out of anger). There is talk of transferring staff out of the state. I go into our back kitchen, which is like a Room of Requirement that will produce as much food as you want, as long as it is bad for you (think “Dunkin’ Donuts” by-products). As I reheat some coffee that was brewed at least 12 hours ago, I catch myself grinning. I love the smell of microwaved coffee in the morning. Smells like victory.

Then came Wednesday night. The debate. I didn’t watch. I never do. Too much angst and too little control. It didn’t go well for Team Blue. You may have heard that. Big Bird was threatened. The Republican party wants to move on my Muppets? They will literally have to kill me first.

Thursday morning. A drizzly Armageddon. One volunteer tells me that she woke up crying. A woman who’s been working non-stop for 6 months tells me, in a heart-breaking voice, how let down she felt:“If he doesn’t want this...then why am I doing this?” More cars beep going by. These are not our people (unless that hand gesture means something different than I remember). It’s a mad-house, all day. Every person I get on the phone wants to talk about a debate that I haven’t seen. I simply agree that he got his clock cleaned, then ask for more help. Everyone in our office has a theory. One woman tells anyone who will listen about how this is “his plan”, how Obama is thinking next-level, how he’s pulling a ‘rope-a-dope’. She’s loud and persistent. I agree, for quiet’s sake. Many of the staff want to focus on content; they argue that Romney’s actual words will not hold up in the harsh light of day. They are probably right, but it doesn’t matter. This is an optics battle, and we’ve lost it. 

Near the end of the day a very large man with a very small dog comes in, yelling. He tells us we are stupid. He tells us Obama is stupid. He tells us what we need to tell Obama to put on the heavy gloves and come out swinging (How anyone who’s ever watched a boxing match can compare it to a presidential debate is beyond me. Yet it persists). The man is shouting so loud that I can no longer make phone calls. We remind him that Obama doesn’t give us his cell. He doesn’t care. A high-level official in the state campaign talks to him for 15 minutes, trying to channel his anger into activism. All to no avail. Lest we forget, this is a Democrat. A supporter. I’ve got 5 minutes left to go in my week, when one of the Field Organizers suggests that I talk to this lovely man about volunteering. I talk to him for 10 minutes. He doesn’t want to listen, he wants to yell. He pats my chest numerous times in a way that makes me want to take his face off. I eventually tell him that he’s talking to the wrong people; that if he’d care to talk to the unconverted, there do seem to be a large number of phones lying around unused. He doesn’t seem to care for my sense of humor. He exits, with dog. I was bluffing, of course. I’d rather have Charles Manson making calls for the president than this buffoon. Cute dog though.

In some ways this was not an average week. But it’s always highs and lows, and the office dynamic is not conducive to reasoned reaction. The thing about people working in a Democratic campaign office: people are real hard for the Democratic Party (go figure). Think zealots, then think deep-fried. And since it’s a Team Blue outpost, we don’t get a whole lot of the Republican viewpoint in here. This leads to a couple of quirks: 

Firstly, all discussions become a sort of competitive agreement. Everyone basically accepts some core beliefs (“Romney bad, Obama good”, “Republicans hate women and poor people”, “socialism good” (kidding on that last one, but only sorta)), so all that we can do is disagree about WHY the President is so great, which of his many accomplishments is his greatest, and why exactly conservative America has gone so far off the rails. The preacher is talking to the choir, and the choir is talking right back, and nobody is really listening, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re all saying the same damn thing.

Secondly, since our common enemy is assumed, our actual opposition becomes our fellow Democrats who are NOT volunteering. Various motives are attributed to them: ignorance, apathy, and complacency being the foremost. Part of me gets it: a whole lot of people want Barack Obama elected, but a much smaller portion of those people are actually working to make it happen. They’re fighting to motivate an often sluggish base, and there is some resentment there. The problem is obvious: everybody is busy, campaigning is joyless work, and politicians have done nothing to endear themselves to America in the last few years. But it is what it is: we spend a lot of our time talking about fellow Democrats like an unemployed uncle who won’t get out of the pool and find a job.

And lastly, I’ve become something of a spokesman for the Romney campaign. It gets pretty boring when all news of the other side is greeted with an automatic “what buffoons these elephants be!” I find it a lot more interesting to talk about what Romney’s goals are, what his tactical aims are, what things he might do well as a president, what we can learn from him. Whenever the possibility of a Romney presidency is brought up in the office, there are the usual references to the end of the world and a mass exodus to Canada. But let’s face it: if liberals had moved to The Big Maple every time they’d threatened to, there would be more than one family per caribou in the Yukon.  

I was there when Bush won in 2004, and we had an End of the World party, and the world didn’t end. People here hold the Republican party in contempt, and I understand why, but it’s wrong. This empathy gap, this abandonment of understanding, only traps our country in this 45% vs. 45% struggle, with the least informed 10% deciding every election. This, to me, seems to be the critical flaw of our current system. But that is simply never considered. We talk about victory. We do not discuss success. 

A little Fear and a lot of Loathing on the Campaign Trail

         I’m back, old friends. Back in America, with electricity and the interweb and delicious synthetic peanut butter. Yes, I’m unemployed. Yes, my tax forms list my occupation as “freeloader”. And yes, I do introduce myself at parties as “Dan Waldron, jobless mooch.” But even we jobless mooches can give a little back to society now and again. My first week living in beautiful Media, Pennsylvania, I got nothing done. The goals were too nebulous, and my time was too free. So the second week I began volunteering for an up-and-coming politician, Barack Hussein Obama. The name, I agree, is not ideal. But his wife makes Halle Berry look like a homeless person, and his voice sounds like God and Clooney reading Maya Angelou. He’s got a future.

More than any other thing from my days in Africa, I miss the writing, my constant documentation of the crowded ephemera that makes up a given day. So while I have these precious few weeks working on Obama 2.0, I decided write a blog. I’ll try to keep the posts shorter...or to find an editor. Hopefully none of what I’m about to reveal is proprietary information, or any huge state secret. We’ll only know if somebody reads it. Here’s hoping.

I am a Volunteer Fellow with the Obama campaign in Pennsylvania. Four days a week, 9-5 (9-9 on Mondays) I work out of an office in Delaware County. I have been given my own little slice of turf in Delco, wherein I am expected to mobilize and set up a team of volunteers, who will become the drivers of our Get Out The Vote (GOTV) operation in the days before the election. I call 100-150 supporters a day, people who we know are on our side, and I ask them to come in and talk with me about volunteering. In a good day I recruit 5 volunteers. When they come in, I sit ‘em down, explain where we are in the campaign, what our plan is going forward, and that while phone-calling/canvassing is unsexy and largely unrewarding, it’s also important and effective.

If you are a voter and you have a phone, you’ve probably been called. If you’re undecided, we’ll ask you why, then we will call you again in a week. If you say you’re with us, we’ll ask you to volunteer. If you say no, we’ll wait till the election, then we will call you back. If you say yes, then you’ll start dialing. If you’re against us, congratulations, we won’t call you again. We’re relentless, and there’s a lot of us, and we have a lot of phones. Are we an annoyance? Undoubtedly. It’s kind of shocking how unappealing our operation is to our customers. And we ain’t the only ones calling. DCCC, Delaware County Dems, Republicans, pollsters. We are hated, and we hate it, and we keep on dialing.

The phone rings in my ear all day. It most often goes to voicemail (you clever blokes out there who have voicemails that sound like you’ve actually picked up...I’ll see you all in hell). The phone gets answered about 15% of the time. 1/3 of those don’t want to talk to anyone they don’t already know. They hang up, and I can’t blame them. 1/3 of the people hear me out, but are too busy or too burnt-out to volunteer. 1/3 agree to come in, out of some mix of ideological fervor, guilt, and duty. The ones that do come in often don’t want to make calls or canvass, the very things we need.

This is modern campaigning. There are few rallies and little talk of policy. The time for that is over (some would say it’s been over for years). The support is calcified; the vast majority have already made their minds. Our job is to call everyone and sort them into two piles, Red and Blue (in this case I don’t mean Republican or Democrat. I mean people who will vote for Obama, or for Romney. Thankfully there is still a little crossover.) Red we don’t call back, Blue...oh, they’ll get called. We will get them to a poll if we have to carry them.  We are sorting and sifting and isolating, and come November 6 we will do all in our power to turn every potential vote into an actual vote. 

Who are the volunteers? A lot of retirees, for whom this is old hat (they have great McGovern stories). A lot of college students. Some unemployed or part-time people. Some eggheads, some hippies, and a few communists. Mostly older, blue-collar people who are frustrated, but hopeful. The office is run by two young women fresh out of college. They have been doing this for months. By this, I mean working 12-hour days, 7 days a week, on a salary that, if spread out hourly, comes to half of the minimum wage. One can’t help but feeling that their time could be used more efficiently; that you could get the same output with a lot less burnout. They are intrigued by my Peace Corps service. I get the feeling that they wanted to go into politics, and now that they’ve done it, they don’t. 

Most days I sit with my phone in one hand, calling the next number that comes up in the database. While it rings I shift to another tab, and read a paragraph of a sports story, or a film review, or a news article. I read a lot of news, and I’m not sure I should. Something begins to happen while I’m calling Obama’s supporters and reading about his numbers in Pennsylvania at the same time. I’m no longer sure if I’m making the news happen, or if the news is making me. It’s impossible to believe, as you get hung up on for the umpteenth time, that a national election is decided by local action. By the end of the day I’m trapped in a feedback loop: reading the news and trying to make the news change and coming to believe that the news makes itself change, and then there’s another article, and it’s new news, and I keep dialing. 

I do not understand the endgame. This post must give the impression that I hate campaigning, Republicans, and Democrats equally. I do not. I hate American elections. They work exactly counter to the idea of governing. Some of you have already heard my rant, but: on the morning of November 7th, at least 45% of the country is going to wake up pissed off. A system that only pleases 11 out of 20 people is a real crappy system. I don’t know what the better plan is. I don’t know what sort of person could get 60% of the vote in America in 2012 (The last president to get 60% of the vote? Try Tricky Dick Nixon...40 years ago). I’m just worried that no one is trying. The people I work with are dedicated. They are patriots. They care about this country and they want to make it better, and they believe in the ideas which they are championing. So do the volunteers on the other side. And the crazy thing is that they have far more in common with one another than with the 10% of voters whom they’re courting. 

The machines are in their highest gears. The operations are up and humming. On November 6, it all comes down to a full-out sprint, and one team will win and another will lose. Then, on the morning of November 7, mark my words, somebody will start talking about Election 2016. These things come so close together, and they please so few people. Over a billion dollars will be spent on this divisive, destructive election. But the more we spend, the less of a return we get. It’s an arms race: more money, more ads, and more coverage. But the prize is a lonely chair behind a large desk, trying to govern two sides of a nation who will not talk to each other. We can’t go on like this. But here we go again.