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.
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