[lbo-talk] did anyone actually get involved with the obama campaign?

Maya Kennard maya.kennard at yahoo.com
Mon Nov 10 10:07:27 PST 2008


I did. It was the most amazing time of my life so far! It was our moment :)

________________________________ From: Dorene Cornwell <dorenefc at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Monday, November 10, 2008 11:45:51 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] did anyone actually get involved with the obama campaign?

Hah.  BHO, a friend from high school and I all graduated the same year. Friend's parents were country club Republicans. Friend and I both fled the hinterlands for lives in dramatically climes. Friend is now a doctor in LA.

Way last spring before Obama was anointed, friend wrote me something or other about what I thought of election. At the time I was not really taking a position about HRC vs BHO: by that time HRC had done a few things to make me cringe and I figured BHO was going to be more important as a symbol than for policies I could get enthused about. I hate loud crowds in small spaces and could not even muster enthusiasm for caucuses.

I wrote my friend that I was worried about voter suppression in lots of directions, but also that I did not feel able to comment yet on a few different topics. Anyway, I told friend to pick a race or tow where she thought attention would make a difference and to check out options. So here is her account of taking time off from work to go to FL and work on Get out the Vote.

Here is friend's account of her efforts. Full disclosure: I am kind of in awe of her efforts even though now I am going to plug back in on my own account:

I showed up at 8 AM on Thursday morning Oct 30 to the volunteer office in a poor Cuban section of Tampa: "Casa Obama"; I started by doing canvassing--a rather textile term for going door-to-door, up and down avenues and ringing doorbells, being barked at by dogs and looking up house numbers on streets. Same as I did in North Las Vegas in early October and September.  Yeah, brilliantly organized. Lots of email and conference calls and local cellphone communication.  There

were 100,000 Obama volunteers in Florida alone. I was given every day, several times a day, lists of names and addresses of "sporadic" Democrat voters--not

soldier-voters like me, but folks who by record don't vote every election. Targeted canvassing--so no wasted effort. I was given specialized handouts on policy issues and best of all, specific voter information--where each neighborhood's precinct was, how to vote early, how to vote absentee, how to get a ride to the polls, whether or not parolees could vote, etc. That was probably the single most useful thing I did-- make sure whoever showed up at the door

knew exactly where to go to vote. For all the fancy Internet stuff, I think democracy is a hand-made product delivered on foot.  I generally did canvassing from 10 AM until after dark--did neighborhoods by flashlight (yes, we did work in pairs), and in the Florida sun, and in the rain. Democrats have a perverse love of 3rd floor walkup apartments, I decided. My particular talent was to sweet-talk the gated apartment managers into letting us riff-raff Democrats into the gated apartment grounds. (I think they just took pity on me; I am really

blond and pathetic when I am really tired).  I was also sent off to pick up

absentee ballots so that they would not get lost in the mail, and to give rides to other volunteers when the work was done. I drove one voter to the polls--the taxi service contracted by the Obama office could not get out to her house in time for the polls on Election Day--she lived 10 miles out of town. My GPS (named Minerva McGonagle after the head of Gryffendor House) was a godsend; I got to all sorts of odd little places only because Minerva found them.  I did get into a nasty habit of arguing with her--in her precise British accent she did not always reckon in the construction-caused road changes and once I circled the Tampa airport for 45 minutes, trying to find the right turnoff.

There was an amazing amount of paper goods to be handled during an election;

flyers, door signs, pamphlets, cards, stickers, banners, yard signs.  I made

yard signs and stacked pamphlets and sat on the floor with a half-dozen other volunteers and got paper cuts rearranging a mess of door signs--these are election reminders-- to be hung on the door knobs for  Monday and Election Day. There were two rooms just for the cases of paper campaign literature. I learned to watch a TV show called Sabado Gigante "(Big Saturday") while doing this sort of stuff--its the Latino television show that is American Idol, Miss America

pagent, and Oprah all rolled into one--you don't need to know any Spanish--its mostly about gorgeous women jiggling in bikinis.  My Latino fellow volunteers all loudly criticized the show for demeaning women and were glued to the set. It goes on for hours. Its been hugely popular, at least in Florida, for years.

I learned to like Cuban food at the neighborhood diner--black beans and yellow rice, tall glasses of cafe con leche with sugar, spiced meats with sliced onions, fried plantains and pressed Cuban ham and cheese sandwiches--sitting at the counter with the local shift workers was a cultural experience in itself. My colleagues at the CARE clinic covered my patients while I was away, and they provided me with a big bag of Tootsie Rolls as I was leaving for Tampa to assuage my chocolate needs. I ended up buying more and munching them in traffic. I did play hooky on Saturday morning, ... but then went back to work in the afternoon. The fifteen or so full-time twentysomething volunteers at my office were wonderful--and they had already done three weeks of intense campaigning by the time I got there--made me feel great for America and I can understand why this Kennedy-like experience is so important to this whole generation. Most had just graduated from high school. I was so proud for them; that they could drink in this experience.

I was awash in Obamamania--its when little kids chant his name and hop up and down when I came up to the house--when teenagers on bikes would give me the thumbs up as I walked by--when I laughed out loud at the 14 year old who had

shaved his head with the word: "OBAMA"--when people answered the door with "Mom, Obama people are here"--when Latinos of limited English just bust out with every happy English word they knew when I met them while I was wearing the Obama t-shirt and campaign buttons. One little poor roadside hotel had the most welcoming Spanish speaking lady living there--overjoyed to see us with our pamphlets in Spanish and Spanish-language voter instructions.  It gave her dignity, I think, to have someone seek her out for her vote.  People would stop their cars in the street and beg for an Obama button; I carried extra on my hat to pass out.  Guys got up from the bus stop to help me put up Obama signs.

It wasn't all grand, of course. Mostly I sweated and got sore feet.  Several

ugly people in ugly cars yelled the n-word at me.  It does say something that the racists were so against Obama; good people are known by those that hate them.

So on Election Day I showed up at the volunteer office 5:30 AM.Several of the other full time volunteers had spent the night at the office, making more piles of door signs and getting ready for the day. The lines for voting started at 6 AM, but as the day went on, lines disappeared and it looked like the voting went smoothly.  At the polling places Obama volunteers passed out water to people in line, and helped direct traffic to parking spots. Others stayed at the main office and made a million more phone calls to remind people to vote.  I was sent out to several polling sites to put up signs, then I came back to do two more cycles of canvassing (as if there were anyone left in Tampa who did NOT know it was Election Day), picked up some last-minute absentee ballots, and drove other volunteers around.

After the polls closed there was a party sponsored by the main Obama office for the out-of-state volunteers to watch the results, and I was NOT missing that. It was at the Marriott on Florida street, downtown Tampa--really nice hotel. Appetizers, drinks and two huge TV screens with CNN and NBC on.  There were about 300 people with all sort of TV camera crews there, all of us loud and happy and jumpy for the results to start coming in.  One guy dressed up as Lincoln--hat and beard included, got on stilts and was strolling around the crowd waving Obama signs. Hysterical. The CNN and NBC commentaries were silly and useless--couldn't hear it anyway with all the crowd, and we all just waited and waited for results.

Everything we did had worked.  When Pennsylvania and Ohio went blue we cheered like mad--then more states went blue, and finally Virginia and Florida and NBC declared Obama President.  Pandamonium! Chants of O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA! and Yes We Can!, Yes We Can!, Yes We Can! Most emotional for me were the cheers of "U-S-A!" "U-S-A!" "U-S-A!" It had been a long time since I was proud of my own country. Great to be there, great to have done it, great to be with that crowd at that time and in that place.

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 2:11 AM, boddi satva <lbo.boddi at gmail.com> wrote:


> On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 12:38 PM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>
> wrote:
> > Out of curiosity, I was hoping folks who actually got involved in the
> > campaign could tell me a little more about what they observed. For
> instance,
> > did anyone actually participate in how the campaign used barcodes to
> track
> > potential voters.
>
> When you say the campaign "used barcodes" what do you imagine that means?
>
> Campaigns - at least smart ones - use barcoded forms to make it easier
> for volunteers to enter information. That way they can put the
> response info from calling or doorbelling into the computer by swiping
> a laser pen over a form and hitting a couple numbers rather than
> typing and finding and generally doing things that are time-consuming
> and lead to mistakes. Alas, most campaigns get the training to use the
> barcodes but end up not doing it.
>
> Barcodes are just a way to represent a number in a database.. They have
> nothing to do with SKUs on products or assimilation into The Borg.
>
> Republicans do use more consumer data in their targeting, mostly
> through marketing consultants, as I understand it. Democrats focus
> more on voter lists. Both sides are very unsophisticated relative to
> private industry.
>
> What the new system the Dems use allows for is information to be
> changed dynamically. During the Kerry campaign, a lot of people got
> absolutely inundated with the same calls. This time you may have
> noticed a lot less repetition. When you talked to a volunteer on the
> phone, your responses actually were recorded in a meaningful way this
> time! Wow!
>
> The biggest change to data this year was a huge expansion in the way
> volunteers could be managed with Internet tools.
>
> The "data mining" that went on is really more data sharing. The fact
> that the Democratic party now has a voter list backbone has moved the
> world from one of  campaigns hording their little spreadsheets of
> names to a sharing across campaigns through a central system.
>
> And it's all done by people a lot like you.
>
>
> Stuff like that -- or not like that also -- would be
> > interesting.
> >
> > thanks!
> >
> > shag
> >
> > http://cleandraws.com
> > Wear Clean Draws
> > ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
>
>
> --
> peace,
>
> boddi
>
> http://financialroadtosocialism.blogspot.com/
>  ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
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