Drill, baby, drill (revisited)

The blues, in a good way

Dan, who runs the campaign office here, has a great policy: Sure, you can pay for a sign or a sticker (stickers are in short supply); but better, you should earn it. Make 200 calls, and you get a yard sign.

I rocketed past that last week, and we have only so many linear feet of frontage, so I have to content myself with one little sign that I've earned a dozen times over. I'm thrilled that it's not just the plumbago context that brings so many thumbs-ups from the constant stream of traffic on our street.

The ground-war scripts change every day -- today, it was to urge supporters to vote early, by mail or at the Supervisor of Elections' office -- but the message is unwavering: This is the time for change, and you can be the change.

Please do vote early. If you do, I can take you off my call list, sit back, and eat the cookies I took into the office.

Three weeks and counting.

Spadework

You prune and tend and fertilize, and you go on with your life.

You toddle on over to campaign headquarters, sling a 12-pack of Diet Coke into the fridge for everyone, get the orders of the day and sit down and dial.

You might be looking for volunteers, or for undecided voters, and you dial and talk and encourage and persuade the very best you can, because you truly believe that if things go wrong in 26 days, you will never forgive yourself if you didn't do everything you could.

On your several lists, this being the place it is, are an English-born writer with 11 novels (an avid supporter, you quickly and gladly learn, who volunteers to knock on doors for the first shift of the Saturday canvass -- click this, click that, and the system schedules her), a legend of a pollster, an old Conch politician facing jail time for a horrid drunk-driving accident who won't let you off the phone, a state rep, an incredibly supportive restaurant owner you know. . . .

You make a few hundred calls and go home. Where you discover that the mussaenda you pruned those few days ago has gone about its own vital mission and generated a new bloom finally big enough for you to get a picture of, maybe an inch across.

Earned it

I stopped into the Obama office at about Mile 2 the other day to see if I could buy a sign, and Dan, the guy who's running the county campaign, said he'd rather give me one if I did some volunteer work.

What they needed most, he said, was some basic feet-on-the-street canvassing to clear up a voter list. ("Crocsplastic" will never replace "shoeleather" as a term of art, but the basic idea never changes.)

So there I was today, quickly briefed and sent out to knock on doors and ask some questions. I was paired off with Bob, a strategic planner from Chicago who'd been laid off and came down to volunteer because he and his wife had bought a house here last year.

We spent four hours going up and down streets on the eastern edge of Casa Marina, gaining data and blisters and having a great time. Turns out we had some friends in common back in Chicago (he actually worked for the Trib at one point while I was there, in info tech management), and he was rapidly inputting data when I limped home to nurse my tired toes.

And hobble across the porch to put the sign up.

Sunday funnies

Yep, that's Amerika's Sweetheart down at front-row center, no doubt researching her policy toward Vikings -- which probably is that we shouldn't ever second-guess them, either.

At any rate, tough times like this give wordsmiths a field day -- pros and amateurs alike.

Some of the weekend's best:

"So the Republicans have decided to run against themselves. The bums have tiptoed out the back door and circled around to the front and started yelling, 'Throw the bums out!' . . . It is a bold move on the Republicans' part — forget about the past, it's only history, so write a new narrative and be who you want to be — and if they succeed, I think I might declare myself a 24-year-old virgin named Lance and see what that might lead to." -- Garrison Keillor.

"The economy is in a tailspin. The financial sector is lurching about on rubbery legs. We’re mired in self-defeating energy policies. We’re at war. And we are still vulnerable to the very real threat of international terrorism. With all of that and more being the case, how can it be a good idea to set in motion the possibility that Americans might wake up one morning to find that Sarah Palin is president?" -- Bob Herbert.

Q: I'm sure you've seen all the comparisons in the media and among Republicans of Sarah Palin to Wonder Woman. How do you feel about that? A: "Don’t get me started. She’s the anti-Wonder Woman. She’s judgmental and dictatorial, telling people how they’ve got to live their lives. And a superior religious self-righteousness -- that’s just not what Wonder Woman is about. . . . Worry about your own life! Worry about your own family! Don't be telling me what I want to do with mine." -- Lynda Carter.

"At an Alaska Municipal League gathering in Juneau in January, mayors across the political spectrum swapped stories of the governor’s remoteness. How many of you, someone asked, have tried to meet with her? Every hand went up, recalled Mayor Fred Shields of Haines Borough. And how many met with her? Just a few hands rose. Ms. Palin soon walked in, delivered a few remarks and left for an anti-abortion rally." -- From a long New York Times story on her management style.

"We all expect a certain amount of deceit from people running for office, in the form of fudging, distortion, exaggeration and omission. But the McCain campaign's approach . . .is to normal political attacks what Hurricane Ike is to a drive-through carwash. . . . He has chosen to smear his opponent with ridiculous claims that he thinks the American people are gullible enough to believe. He has charged repeatedly that his opponent is willing to lose a war to win an election. What's McCain willing to lose to become president? Nothing so consequential as a war. Just his soul." -- Steve Chapman.

"If we’ve learned anything from the GOP convention and its aftermath, it’s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America’s chief executive. . . .No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for “victory,” whether in Iraq or in Michigan." -- Frank Rich.

Shocked!

Maybe I haven't been paying attention for the last several decades, because if I had, I'm sure I might think it was a cheap ploy to bring it up now -- but John McCain actually let us know tonight, talking about himself, that he'd been a prisoner of war.

I can't imagine the persuasion it must have taken for him to bring it up, at least a dozen times, dismissive as he is to the politics of personality.

- - -

And does anyone else who works with community nonprofits find it sad that the party has reduced a thousand points of light to one point of ridicule?

Frabjous day

Calloo, callay, and I choke up every time I think about it.


So I yield the floor to the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, who is far more eloquent than I:

There will be plenty of time to chart Barack Obama's attempt to navigate a course between the exigencies of the old politics and the promise of the new, between yesterday and tomorrow, youth and experience, black and white. For now, take a moment to consider the mind-bending improbability of what just happened.

A young, black, first-term senator -- a man whose father was from Kenya, whose mother was from Kansas and whose name sounds as if it might have come from the roster of Guantanamo detainees -- has won a marathon of primaries and caucuses to become the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. To reach this point, he had to do more than outduel the party's most powerful and resourceful political machine. He also had to defy, and ultimately defeat, 389 years of history.

It was in 1619 that the first Africans were brought in chains to these shores, landing in Jamestown. That first shipment of "servants" did not include any of Obama's ancestors; it's impossible to say whether some distant progenitor of his wife, Michelle, might have been present at that moment of original sin. Ever since -- through the War of Independence, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the great migration to Northern cities and the civil rights struggle -- race has been one of the great themes running through our nation's history.

I'm old enough to remember when Americans with skin the color of mine and Obama's had to fight -- and die -- for the right to participate as equals in the life of the nation we helped build. Watching Obama give his speech Tuesday night marking the end of the primary season and the beginning of the general election campaign, I thought back to a time when brave men and women, both black and white, put their lives on the line to ensure that African Americans had the right to vote, let alone run for office -- a time when Democrats in my home state of South Carolina were Dixiecrats, and when the notion that the Democratic Party would someday nominate a black man for president was utterly unimaginable.

Tiresome, isn't it? All this recounting of unpleasant history, I mean. Wouldn't it be great if we could all just move on? Bear with me, though, because this is how we get to the point where, as Obama's young supporters like to chant, "race doesn't matter." No one will be happier than I when we reach that promised land, and we've come so far that at times we can see it, just over the next hill. But we aren't there yet.

This is a passage from an e-mail I received in April from an Obama volunteer in Pennsylvania: "We've been called 'N-lovers,' Obama's been called the 'Anti-Christ,' our signs have been burned in the streets during a parade, our volunteers have been harassed physically, or with racial slurs -- it's been unreal."

Yet the amazing thing isn't that there were instances of overt, old-style racism during this campaign, it's that there were so few. The amazing thing is that so many Americans have been willing to accept -- or, indeed, reject -- Obama based on his qualifications and his ideas, not on his race. I'll never forget visiting Iowa in December and witnessing all-white crowds file into high school gymnasiums to take the measure of a black man -- and, ultimately, decide that he was someone who expressed their hopes and dreams.

When historians and political scientists write books about this extraordinary campaign season, surely they will seek to assess what impact Obama's race had on his prospects. But they will also devote volumes to exploring how he put together a fundraising apparatus that generated undreamed-of amounts of cash, and how his organization drew so many new voters into the process, and how his young supporters made use of social-networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and how his delegate-counting team managed to consistently outthink and outhustle everyone else. It will be written that Obama's nomination victory owes as much to adroit management as it does to stirring inspiration.

Will Americans take the final step and elect Obama as president? Should they? Is this first-term senator up to the job?

We'll find out soon enough. At the moment, to tell the truth, I don't care. Whether Obama wins or loses, history has been made this year. Maybe there's more to come, maybe not; but already -- after 389 long years -- it's safe to say that this nation will never be the same.

Audacious hope

Earlier tonight, I put up an item reflecting how unhappy I was with Sen. Clinton's victory address in Kentucky. I deleted that item.

Because I've just listened to Sen. Obama's address in Iowa. And again I know: I don't have to be unhappy. Victory is on its way.

The curse of memory

I was listening to Sen. Clinton's speech Tuesday night, with its "we can still claim victory" theme, and suddenly the Wayback Machine kicked in. Oops, a vortex.

It was August of 1974, just days before the mawkish* final wave from Air Force One as that other lying, conniving, money-grubbing bastard, that other practitioner of the Southern Strategy, headed off to San Clemente, and the Guardian of Manchester proved again the wisdom of seeing ourselves through others' eyes.

Their classic Page One headline:

Nixon is dead — but
he won't lie down

* Mawkish originally meant "maggoty" (from Middle English mawke, maggot), hence squeamish, nauseating, hence tending to render squeamish or make nauseated, especially because of excessive sentimentality.