The Indiana Adventure

Even with less than 12 hours until the inauguration, I've got to admit that there's still some neurotic little part of me that can't entirely believe this is really going to happen. It's not that I fear the unthinkable. Mainly I fear some 'crisis' will erupt elsewhere that can be used to justify a 'delay' of some kind, leaving us all in kind of this ambiguous state where we won't know what will happen next without some thorough discussion and study of constitutional law and legal precedent. What with the Minnesota recount, Burris, etc. I've had enough of those for one election season!

That neurotic little part of me is obviously batshit f'ing loco, but I gotta say that this anxiety was kind of a helpful thing to have during the campaign, if only because it finally got me off my ass and into the campaign offices to help out.

Though I was in Chicago the days up to November 4 mainly to check out a town I've been wanting to visit and take in some sights with an old college friend before the big, big night in Grant Park, I felt the need to spend at least one day helping out the campaigns in the battlegrounds around Illinois.

But which one? Illinois bordered two major battleground states: Missouri and Indiana. Mizzou seemed to be the sensible place to go -- so much hay was made of Missouri and its bellwether status, and none other than fivethirtyeight predicted that Indiana was going to be close but ultimately lost. Indiana has been pretty safely Republican since the 60s! Clinton lost to Dole (Dole?!?) there by 6% in '96!

But laziness won out: St. Louis, MO was a good 5-6 hour drive away while Lake County, IN was (in theory, at least) about 41 minutes away. So I signed on with the Gary Office for what I expected was going to be the go-down-with-your-guns-blazing fight in Indiana, bellwethers be damned.

While Indiana was safely red, Gary, however, was a different story. It was run down but had a large black population that tended to swing Lake County blue. It was because of this that the networks just could not call Indiana in the Democratic Primaries until all the votes came in from Lake County the morning after.

The Indiana Primaries, as best experienced...

Gary was kind of a bleak place, as I had been warned, but I've got to admit I've been in more dangerous parts in East Oakland.

Seen better days

The places I visited had obviously seen better days, but they were actual bedroom communities -- neighborhoods, not the high-density projects that I had grown up around in Oakland. In spite of it all, Gary had a certain kind of look that makes me wish now that I had taken many more pictures.

The Gary office was, as might be expected, much scrappier than the Reno office I was in weeks earlier. It was in a run-down strip mall in a shop that still had the signage for a computer parts store. Next to it was a police department inside a converted mall shop. It didn't have nearly as much schwag to hand out, which kind of bummed me out because so many people wanted it when I went out. I guess it's kind of the penalty of being a safe territory. Like many in California I had to buy my schwag, but in tightly-contested Reno, NV we went out with armfuls of yard signs, buttons, and stickers to hand out at will. But Gary's schwag supply could've been sparse because we were there on election eve -- that sort of thing wasn't going to do that much good anymore.

Appearances aside, the campaign was tightly organized. They had staffers there recently pulled out of South Carolina and they still had the nice packets and lists put together for us. Being election eve, we were now in the GOTV (Get Out The Vote) stage of the campaign. Our mission was no longer to cajole and persuade, but to talk to everyone on that turf about voting and blanket a it with literature with precise instructions on the polling location and what to bring and be prepared for, Obama supporter or not.

Who's turf? No really, who's turf???

This was where that good sense of map-reading and checking lists helped me out quite a good deal. I can't be sure if there was some kind of electoral board chicanery was going on, but it did seem to me the turf for a given polling place was particularly small, so that many people across the street from each may well have had entirely different polling places to go to. I canvassed with a guy who had worked the Gary office before and felt comfortable just heading out after a good look at the map and lists and leaving them back on the car.

The first 3 blocks were good, but after that I noticed a copy of literature already posted with a different polling place on it. Due to previous mix-ups the office told us to go ahead and destroy any of these we found and place our 'correct' information, and my canvassing partner was ready to go ahead and do that. I got antsy and insisted we go back and re-check the map, and indeed, we had gone outside of our turf. Luckily we didn't get far (and we removed our bad info) but I shudder to think about how many votes we could've lost if we'd just tore up the 'wrong' literature and replaced it with ours. I think we wouldn't have been more than a block off, but you never know how this kind of thing could add up. What could that be? 20 votes? 50 votes?

I mainly thought about how crushed these people would be if the campaign misled them. Unlike the sheltered suburbs of Reno, the people in these neighborhoods were thrilled to see us and incredibly kind. Many appreciated seeing an Asian guy out from California and a White guy from Illinois coming over to help out. One old guy undid several deadbolts and a unlocked a screen door to come out and shake my hand and talk. Amost teary-eyed, he told me he had been a lifelong Republican but told me he had to vote for Obama. People hailed us from across the street. It was great to see a bunch of people who have obviously seen a lot of tough times finally have something to be really excited about. "Flip Indiana and we can start the party early tomorrow!", we often told them.

And so it was -- Obama squeaked by in Indiana by 0.9%, the first time the state went blue since '64. By the time it was called, Obama had already clinched the win with the results from the west coast (so 10pm CST, a reasonably good time to kick off a party). But winning states like IN and NV were the kinds of firewalls we needed to keep us from repeating the nightmare scenarios where one silly electoral college-heavy state could've swung the entire election sometime in the wee hours of November 5. IN was particularly sweet since it was a state many had not expected to win.

I actually caught the moment we clinched the win with some shoddy camera work on my digicam in Grant Park...

Countdown to victory!

The whole experience was terrific and I actually find myself looking forward to go back into the trenches in 2012! Hopefully I'll see some of you there.

All you need to know

The hours tick away on this last weekend before I head into work on what looks to be yet another very busy year for me. I've been going through the cartoon series and have been pretty surprised at how much I'm enjoying it. Toon to live-action transitions are tricky, so we'll see how it turns out.

Like some dingy stock room full of heavily-discounted-yet-unsold inventory, I find myself sitting on a stack of bloggable moments from 2k8 that I wish I had unloaded over the holiday season. One item that I think 'must go!' follows...

My usual enthusiasm for presidential politics went up another level this year as I not only signed up to volunteer for a political campaign – I signed up to travel to neighboring battleground states to try to help swing those. The weekend after wrapping up a show which had me working six-day weeks since early summer, I joined up with the Obama campaign in NV to do some canvassing. (Canvassing is basically going around knocking on doors.)

I was at least a bit nervous about the whole thing. This was that week in early October when we started seeing some disturbing behavior pop up at the McCain-Palin rallies. NV had gone red twice the last two elections, though it was pretty close. It was about as close when Clinton won there in the 90s as well, though.

And I actually wasn't totally sure how well I'd behave. I may be used to launching into some rant here in the people's republic of Berkeley among comrades either too gracious, too concurring, or too dismissive to argue, but what if I had to talk to some nut who really thought Obama was a secret Muslim terrorist?

By then, though, these people had almost gotten to be a curiosity for me. It wasn't so much about enlightening them for me as it was just meeting them in person and confirming that they exist outside of crazy youtube videos.

I also found myself sitting next to two conservative-leaning folks at work for a few months in the spring and got into various little debates over issues like global warming, Al Gore, and the electoral college. Usually I was smart enough to just let these guys be, though. After all, anybody who still thinks conservativism makes sense after the last eight years and remains unconvinced otherwise after having lived in the SF Bay for several years probably isn't going to change their mind on account of me.

Swingin' Reno

There were various offices in NV, so I was tempted to do the fun thing and go down to Clark County. Besides being the county where Vegas is, it's also a pretty safely liberal county that went Democratic even in the last two elections, so it might have been an easier place to go for my first time. Washoe was more rural/suburban, with Reno probably being the only town that you might be familiar with. It had gone red all through the Clinton years and especially so the Bush years. But I kind of felt guilty going for the safe/fun option, so suburban/rural Washoe it was, 'Mississipi Burning' paranoia be damned.

I chose... wisely!

Guess who's coming to Reno?

That was the week Obama went back to Hawaii for an emergency visit to his ailing grandmother. On his way back, he stopped in Reno for a quick rally. I first heard word of it on Thursday when I was reading the Caucus blog on the NYT. Apparently word had spread quickly -- it was the buzz in the hotel lobby as people were checking in on Friday night. Basically, instead of the campaign office, people were being told to go to one of the softball fields over at UNR in the morning.

A 'small' rally

It was a relatively 'small' crowd for an Obama rally –- only about 10-15k (some say 20k), I figure. As might be expected, several elements of the big guy's speech were familiar to anybody following the presidential race, though I heard a few odd lines and jokes not usually seen in the news or the interenets. There was also an unusual thing that happened when the power went out for about 10-15 minutes so he just hung out for a bit shaking hands and greeting folks until it was fixed.

Keepin' it cool during the outage...

Meeting the people

It was a nice surprise and a great way to kick off my first time volunteering in a political campaign. Besides general enthusiasm, I think the rally had the campaign offices absolutely flooded with volunteers. There'd be long lines to get assignments and I ended up splitting lists with groups of people because they'd flat ran out of assignments.

The satellite office

As I discovered, a well-run campaign reduces the chance of confrontation almost by design. The materials the campaign sent out specifically instructed the canvasser NOT to get into arguments and to only offer information and corrections on areas they were fluent in. Furthermore, it's not like you sweep through an entire neighborhood. The campaign specifically targets persuadable or undecided voters based on previous canvassing and phone bank results, so that in some 'turfs' you may only be given as few as 1 or 2 addresses to contact. If you found a house festooned with McCain schwag, you'd basically skip it and mark it down on the list as a strongly decided voter for McCain to save any future volunteer the hassle.

There's apparently more to Reno than the strip!

The extent of any hostility I encountered was people totally ignoring the doorbells because they were so sick of being contacted all the time. There was one old man in a trailer park who drove by joking that he wanted to make sure we weren't Acorn people (which of course was neither here nor there -- the Acorn 'scandal' was about voter registration. By then the voter reg deadline in NV had long passed.)

The only real 'argument' I had was with one really nice lady whose husband was strongly McCain and had her take down an Obama sign she had put up a few weeks ago. She said she was back to undecided after she got a mailer saying that Obama was going to repeal the 2nd amendment. She was pretty open minded and I think we were able to reassure her that this wasn't the case. She also wasn't too sure about 'spreading the wealth' with boosts to entitlement programs, so we talked about the pragmatic thinking involved in these kinds of economic programs from the banking bailout to very basic programs like these that try to prevent greater, costlier problems with comparatively cheap solutions now. When we left her she said she liked Obama and was probably going to vote for him, but seemed to want to be visited again. Talking to other volunteers, it wasn't altogether uncommon to come across a split household where we'd be looking for the lady of the house, but the husband would answer the door for her and pretty much shoo us away. A look at the list (your list would often still include contacts for voters recently marked unpersuadable) would usually show that he was leaning McCain.

Exploring a 2040 run...

I really enjoyed meeting other volunteers and talking to voters. I worked with some recent Cal grads the first day, and on the second day I joined up with a family to double-check any folks that were missed on Saturday. They had this little 10-year-old that was remarkably good at belting out the talking points, which was really cute. She kind of helped warm people up a bit if they weren't so enthused about answering their door on a Sunday morning.

I just generally had a great time with the experience. Goals were so well parsed down that it almost felt like a video game: You'd start out with this nice packet with maps, voter lists, and campaign materials. Simply hit as many of the addresses in that territory as you can, marking your progress and distributing campaign materials as needed, and do your best when somebody may need a little persuading. If you're not versed on an issue they're worried about, simply say so and refer them to the material. Or hopefully you'll be paired up with somebody who can cover on that.

Objective lists. Map reading. Processing lists and lists of info. Managing your items. This is pretty much what anybody racking up achievements on their 360 or raiding dungeons in WoW is doing. I found that this and just a basic interest in the process was all you really need to know to get started. Frankly, it may have helped me save a good turf's worth of votes in Gary, IN when I worked there on election eve. (I'd like to get out a write-up on that soon as well.)

In the end Washoe went blue for the first time in at least 20 years, and Obama won Nevada by a pretty healthy margin!