Saturday, November 01, 2008
72 hours
Here's a recording of the conference call Obama just had with his 20,000 field organizers. (Video from Open Left.)
If everybody keeps it up, this is really going to happen. It's not just the encouraging trends in the national polls over the last few days that make me feel this way. It's also what I'm seeing here in northeast Philadelphia, which is kind of like an economically raped post-apocalyptic version of Staten Island.
I talked to a woman on the phone today who was 30 years old and had decided to vote for the first time in her entire life. I knocked on the front door of a man who was so poor that the door literally did not have a doorknob -- the man stumbled onto a porch littered with abandoned children's toys and suspicious-looking little baggies, and even though the voter was spaced out of his mind on whatever was once in those baggies, he could recite the exact address of his polling place and wanted to know how he could get involved as a campaign volunteer! I talked to a 40something mother who claimed she was undecided and was promptly argued into submission by her teenage children. I witnessed local people wandering up and down the streets and shouting, to no one in particular, "Obama! Obama! Obama!"
When I was here in September we were told that the campaign wanted the many thousands of persuadable voters in this ward to be contacted in person six times. This was supposed to be impossible. Yet I spoke to literally dozens of people today who said, in one way or another, "I keep telling you guys I'm voting for Obama! Why do you have to keep calling and knocking on my door?"
When we were forced to move out of our campaign office this morning over a complicated and confusing dispute with the landlord, people simply sat down on the sidewalk and continued to make hundreds, if not thousands of calls, for another eight hours until it was too dark to read the phone lists.
The entire McCain presence in the neighborhood consisted of one single pale, smiling blonde couple from Washington, D.C., wandering aimlessly in search of homes with McCain/Palin yard signs.
72 hours to go.
If everybody keeps it up, this is really going to happen. It's not just the encouraging trends in the national polls over the last few days that make me feel this way. It's also what I'm seeing here in northeast Philadelphia, which is kind of like an economically raped post-apocalyptic version of Staten Island.
I talked to a woman on the phone today who was 30 years old and had decided to vote for the first time in her entire life. I knocked on the front door of a man who was so poor that the door literally did not have a doorknob -- the man stumbled onto a porch littered with abandoned children's toys and suspicious-looking little baggies, and even though the voter was spaced out of his mind on whatever was once in those baggies, he could recite the exact address of his polling place and wanted to know how he could get involved as a campaign volunteer! I talked to a 40something mother who claimed she was undecided and was promptly argued into submission by her teenage children. I witnessed local people wandering up and down the streets and shouting, to no one in particular, "Obama! Obama! Obama!"
When I was here in September we were told that the campaign wanted the many thousands of persuadable voters in this ward to be contacted in person six times. This was supposed to be impossible. Yet I spoke to literally dozens of people today who said, in one way or another, "I keep telling you guys I'm voting for Obama! Why do you have to keep calling and knocking on my door?"
When we were forced to move out of our campaign office this morning over a complicated and confusing dispute with the landlord, people simply sat down on the sidewalk and continued to make hundreds, if not thousands of calls, for another eight hours until it was too dark to read the phone lists.
The entire McCain presence in the neighborhood consisted of one single pale, smiling blonde couple from Washington, D.C., wandering aimlessly in search of homes with McCain/Palin yard signs.
72 hours to go.
posted by Anonymous : 11/01/2008 11:39:00 PM
