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.