Phew!

Just kidding! After a truly harrowing conversation in which I was called by Ohio headquarters and told that NO BLOGGING IS ALLOWED, I panicked I shut it down. But then they just emailed me back to say I had to make it private. So, all is well. If you're reading this blog, you're one of the privileged few that has been specially invited to the party. Comment long and often, we're a small but loyal crowd now.

Hiatus

I won't be blogging for awhile friends. It's campaign policy not to blog when you're out working in the field, and I just found out about this today!!! So thanks for the loyal reading, and check back on November 5.

S

At Home in Ohio

So I have been totally slammed lately. Here is my list of excuses for not posting the last few days:

• This is the hardest I have ever worked at a non-paying job in my life. I do put in those twelve-hour days I was warned about (and then still feel a little guilty about it, since everyone else works fifteen-hour ones).

• There are no days off and no weekends on the campaign. In fact, Saturday and Sunday are the most insane days of all.


• I am helping with the out-of-state volunteer cordination here at the Parma office. That just means that hoards of energetic young Democrats will be descending en masse upon Ohio in the next two weeks (yay!) and I am responsible for at least some of them.


• I spend about 70% of my day making an intense sales pitch to every single person I meet. I want people I talk to on the phone to vote for Barack Obama. I want people who come in for a yard sign to go out canvassing for us. I want undecided voters I meet while I am out canvassing to become Obama supporters. I want Obama supporters I meet while I am out canvassing to become canvassers themselves. There is no limit to what I want from people these days. Sales (even of something you believe in) is pretty exhausting, it turns out. It also turns out I am actually not too bad at it. Lesley would say this is no surprise to her.


• It is hard to follow up posts about Bill Clinton and Al Bundy when I don't have any new celebrity to report on. Although Madeleine Albright IS coming to town on Friday.

Okay. Enough excuses. How are things in Ohio, you ask?

All around, pretty good. I am feeling pretty settled into my home-away-from-home here, thanks especially to the extremely comfy digs and kindness provided by the woman who has opened up her house to a stranger based solely on the fact that I was coming to her state to volunteer for the Obama campaign. Did I mention that she buys me groceries and washes my sheets once a week? Seriously she is one of the best reasons to come to Ohio.

Another (less crucial but still delicious) reason is the apples that are in perfect season right now. They have this delicious hybrid here called Honey Crisp that I have never seen in Massachusetts. Ohio-grown, they are super sweet and absolutely devoid of mush. The perfect apple, basically. I eat at least one every day and they are single-handedly responsible for keeping up my blood sugar in the total absence of regular, healthy meals. Speaking of regular meals, here is my food consumption for the day before yesterday:

Breakfast: cheeseburger
Lunch: meatball sandwich
Dinner: cheeseburger

That's right. An utter breakdown in all of my beliefs about food. It has also been hard to cling to my environmentalist ideals in the midst of this craziness--trying to reuse the reams of paper we need to process canvasses and volunteers, wondering what to do when people drink a whole bunch of bottled water at an event and there's no recycling bin there (the answer is pick 40 plastic bottles out of the trash while confused Ohioans look on with concern).

There are only two more weeks left until this election is decided, at which point I can put away my sales pitch and start eating salad again. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the apples, and the experience.

Al Bundy is the Bomb

So the celebrities are flocking to us like flies these days. Today Ed O'Neill, TV's "Al Bundy," stopped by our office in Parma to stoke the morale of the troops. He's looking a little grizzled these days, but you can still recognize him from his Married with Children heyday. And I have to say, he was super nice.

He came in handy, too. The trick of working the front door of this office is to turn the slews of people that stream in all day looking for "lawn signs" into volunteers for the campaign. It is sometimes like pulling teeth, and staffing the front office for 12 hours nonstop makes you feel a little bit like the only person in the desert who has water. People fall upon these lawn signs like hungry rabid dogs. I love to see the enthusiasm. But I fear for the moment (which is imminent) when we run out again. Things will get ugly.

[Aside. The serious subplot of this campaign is the Hunt for Lawn Signs. Lawn signs are being stolen, lawn signs win elections, lawn signs are being sold on ebay for $25 apiece, the McCain campaign is handing out lawn signs like candy, etc. It's the story of my life, lawn signs.]

So today, unsuspecting lawn sign seekers were greeted with Al Bundy, which awed them just long enough for me to rope them into a volunteer shift without my usual massively hard sell. I even convinced these two 22-year-old kids to come back later in the day for a canvass with the promise of meeting Ed O'Neill. That's a very impressive walk-in to canvass transformation rate, in case you didn't know. (Just trust me.) I wasn't allowed to watch Married with Children when it was on, but Ed O'Neill really made my day easier. Thanks Al.

Everybody Loves Bill

My computer has been down for 24 hours, which at this moment in my life is akin to temporarily losing a finger or my ability to read. I just really can’t function without it. Which is sad. But a topic for a different blog.

I did meet Bill Clinton today though, and as I implied on my facebook status, he is rad. Last time I saw him in person, back in those halcyon days when the national scandal was sexual and not economic, he looked much, much younger and so, probably, did I. Being in a Bill Clinton state of mind today made me nostalgic for those days right after college when I lived in DC, all my friends were “staffers” who worked on “the hill,” and we all thought we were broke even though the most I ever paid in rent was $450 a month. Granted it was upstairs from an Ethiopian restaurant/reggae club that didn’t close until 3 a.m. But still. You just cannot beat that rent.



The event was a rally in downtown Cleveland hosted by the building trades, which means tons of union guys. It was inspiring to see this bunch of people (mostly white, mostly men, and all blue-collar) coming straight from work to see Clinton, support Obama and economic and trade policies that make sense. I wish I could take a snapshot of that crowd to anyone who would like to harp on Obama’s eloquence and claim that he is elitist. Oh wait, I did. Here it is.



These guys get it. Clinton mentioned how the median income in our country has dropped $2,000 per person since the day he left office, but has dropped $4,000 per person in Ohio. I had the feeling this crowd didn’t need to be told this statistic, that they were feeling it.

I hauled around metal bike racks to set up crowd barricades for 4 hours, but in exchange I got to stand on the risers during Clinton’s (as always) kickass speech and meet him after it. And, considering all the streudel I eat here, a full day of heavy exercise came at a great time. Of course, the first day I spent completely outdoors here was also the day it finally decided to get cold. I am only now defrosting many hours later.

I meant to tell you about my canvass yesterday and the guy who came to the door wearing a gun. (Don’t worry—he was really nice.) But that will have to wait until tomorrow, because today it was all about Bill.



Oh, and Cleveland loves wind power! Wind power loves you back, Cleveland.

Parma, Ohio

Parma, Ohio is an interesting place. It’s literally 15 minutes away from Cleveland, but Parma people never seem to go there. The campaign office where I spend 12 hours a day is located on a large connector road, down the street from a WalMart, a McDonalds, and Circuit City. In other words, suburb heaven. But it seems vaguely depressed, at least in this corner of town. When you get off the beaten connector road, the streets are quieter and the homes neater, with lawns. In fact, the citizens are exactly those “suburban undecideds” that Paul Begala said will decide this election on Larry King Live last night. I’ve been talking to some of these suburban undecideds lately, and I have to admit it’s a confusing experience.

The election is three weeks away. The candidates have been campaigning for months and have already have two substantive debates (the final one to take place tomorrow). Their websites are chock full of information on their policy proposals, the ideas they would put into action if elected, and their differences from each other. There is a TON of information out there. To still be undecided at this point is mystifying to me, and yet Ohio has tons of these voters—people who aren’t crazy about either candidate and are putting off their decision like they would put off doing laundry or going to the DMV.

It especially kills me when these undecideds talk about how hard things have been lately—they are elderly and their medical bills are skyrocketing; they are middle-aged and they are stunned at how hard it is to get a loan or think about the cost of college for their children; they are young people without job security because industry has been hit so hard in Ohio. Obama has good, logical policy proposals for each of these problems. I hope we have enough time to let them all know.

But I said I would talk about schnitzel. One thing Parma definitely has over Boston is the schnitzel (various types of meat breaded, fried and covered with cheese and/or gravy). We get it at the Schnitzel Haus, a German restaurant run by Serbians that is down the street from the office and the site for our Saturday night wrap-up sessions. They are nice to us over there at the Schnitzel Haus, and their selection of strange, dark beers makes me think my old drinking buddies Joe and Jason would be happy there. Ohio also has a lot of pierogies, and boxies, and various other kinds of heavy, filling and delightful Eastern European foods. This fact, combined with the late-night Chinese food, the brownies brought in by nice old ladies who love Obama, and the fact that Rudy’s Streudel shop is next door, means I may be rolling home after election day. Hey, we all have to make sacrifices.

Swamped

So much to report, no time for anything except fragments. Here's a few:

Summer weather in October.

Canvassing is fun. Continually surprised at the number of people who are really, really committed to being undecided.

People in Ohio are usually polite even if they think you are crazy and have McCain signs on their lawn.

I'm working in an office of 22-year-olds. Picture a college dorm with campaign stuff.

The subplot of this campaign is the dearth of lawn signs. You know, those signs saying "Obama/Biden" that people put in their yards. McCain camp has tons of 'em and is giving them out like water. We don't. This makes Democrats mad. Turns out lawn signs have little to do with election success; Ohio was blanketed with Kerry signs in 2004. But people still really like them.

The coolest house I canvassed yesterday presented the following scene: Dad out front mowing the lawn while smoking a cigar. Jerked his thumb towards the backyard and said without removing cigar to go around to the backyard where I was greeted with the sight of his wife and daughter sunbathing and drinking margueritas. The mom was an Obama supporter and the daughter undecided. I told her to listen to her mother, who very obviously knows what's up in every way. I sort of wanted to be adopted by this family.

Oh! And calling 91 strangers in a row. I called during the day on Friday, from a list of people over 70 who were likely to be home. I got just a few grumpsters, a lot of undecideds, and a couple seriously sweet old ladies who were hesitating to vote for Obama because of his stance on abortion. I was able to let them know that the number of abortions increased under this current Republican administration, and that McCain isn't even a pro-life candidate (he just wants to let the states decide). And that Obama's health care and economic policies have the best shot of a) preventing unwanted pregnancies through realistic education and available birth control and b) giving young women who do find themselves pregnant encouragement and economic support to help them raise a child.

But enough about policy. Next time I'll tell you about the Schnitzel House. (it's already my favorite tradition here at the office)