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.