my day canvassing for Obama

So someone called Puck to volunteer and I bit the bullet. Many months of me sitting here complaining about the state of america had me guilty about doing next to nothing to help bring around the change I'd rather have than McCain's co-opted pledge of change. So I showed up at the local Obama campaign office, signed in, and caught the last 5 minutes or so of training. I guess the 9:30 AM show up time was a bit off. So I was more than a bit nervous as I missed out on the definitions of all the codes and abbreviations for classifying my contacts. But numbers are easy and that was the most of the classifying. 1=in Obama's pocket 3= undecided 6= get off of my lawn! I got paired with another first time volunteer and we headed out span class="fullpost">to our assignment of about 100 homes a few blocks from the office. We got a voter list that consisted of places that previous canvassers couldn't reach the occupants. I'd say we got to talk to 60-70 out of our 100 ish people. 90% or so of our list were already registered democrats. There were all types of people. I did odd numbered houses and my partner he did evens. We talked politics. My friend is an ex-republican. That's right, even better he is still registered republican. He is even more rah-rah about Obama than I am. His life story was pretty interesting. He is a mathematician who worked in the 80's for a defense contractor and that pretty much steered him into voting republican as voting democrat might mean him losing his job. He told me that once the Berlin wall fell he felt it was probably time to move on or be out of a job, so he went into teaching. Little did he know 8 years or so later the defense budgets would be even bigger than cold war levels thanks to W. He said he voted for Gore and once he went into education felt the need to not vote 'just for himself' and think of the common good, I interrupted and interjected "Americans" and he corrected me by finishing, "the world". I was pleasantly floored. Bush scares him and he views McCain as just as dangerous.

With that anecdote out of the way I'll describe another encouraging thing I saw. College kids were there...from California. It was weirder than you reading it just now because just last night Puckster was out on a drinking date with friends. When I picked her up and in her telling me how her night went, she told me how the election came up in conversation with her work buddies and that one lady stated that the Obama campaign called her house and asked if she could possibly let some college kids from California stay at her house for a few days. So I guess that was true. It's either a hell of a lot of dedication or a heck of a lot of extra credit.

It was strange to see how campaign hardened some of the young people were. I'm a total campaign newbie, but I have to guess that some of these younger adults had been doing this for a while. They were pros. The only bad thing about that is they were a bit jaded in their manner of talk and kind of dehumanizing jokes/comments about the voters. It's easy for me to type that, but the college people really doing this for the last 6 months+ have to get hardened a bit to do the hard work they're doing for so long. So despite that slight jab at the energy I got in the campaign office, I was also extremely impressed at how hard they seemed to be working and how seriously they were going about it. There was a very nice elderly gentleman that knew his stuff manning the check in/check out table. Someone had donated pasta for people to eat. I might have partaken, but I just wanted to get the heck home after walking around from 10 AM until 2 PM.

Maybe that entire last paragraph isn't news to you at all since you've been pretty heavily involved in politics at the ground floor yourself, Bizut. But my apathetic ass gained a new appreciation for how the campaign for Obama has been run. I read about it, but I think, at least for the politically uninitiated, you have to be there to believe. There's some kind of creative sentence that ties in that last sentence's use of the word believe with Obama's slogan, but it's not in me right now as I chuckle at myself for being too lazy to find it.

So anyways, since the list I had was 90% democrat already, there wasn't much persuading of minds as much as reminding people to vote for Obama and also reminding them that in Nevada you can for the first time vote early starting October 18'th at our neighborhood's supermarket (Albertson's if you remember). I think that was the most important message because a lot of people didn't know that when we told them. Some people blatantly lied before we got to the October 18'th part and claimed to have already voted early hehe. Alright, I can't think of anymore to write about the experience besides stupid, insignificant complaints so if there's something you wanna ask about what went down today go ahead and ask in the comments, Bizzy.