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!