October 29th, 2008 Johanna
obama was in norfolk today. since we’re about to embark on a big volunteer-driven GOTV effort, what better place to recruit than an obama rally?
myself and three of our campaign managers packed up our clipboards and sign-up sheets and headed to the rally. we clipboarded for volunteers and members for about 3 hours, but then the doors to the stadium opened and people started rushing in. as the evening wore on obama’s campaing was out in force doing their own volunteer recruitment as well. since there’s no need to compete with our own team, we packed up our list of 64 new members and 40 volunteers and called it a day in terms of outreach.
so, then the question became, do you go back to the office to clean or database, or do you stay and listen to barack’s speech?
the right thing to do from a diligent campaign perspective would have been to go back to the office. the fun thing to do is to stay and watch barack’s speech. we opted for fun.
we hustled through security, and walked out onto the green of the minor league ballpark. there was an amazing high school marching band with a powerful brass section and terrific drum corps getting everybody dancing. we were dancing and grinning as we took in the scene, and then a very official-looking woman pulled us aside and asked if we wanted to sit in the bleachers behind barack obama while he gave his speech… we said sure.
next thing we knew we were getting wisked away to the rock-star seats right behind the podium. we sat there and bonded with the other members of the selected crowd – old, young, black, white, asian, kids in the front row… solid cross-section of society.
organizers handed “change we need” posters and little american flags up through the bleachers, and told us to bunch together closely. i have so often been on the other end of that interaction – felt a little funny to be organized by someone else rather than the other way around. in fact, i watched the event organizers as they walked with giant-cottonfield-steps in a determined and deliberate way that i know myself to be capable of. i was a little jealous, and yet worked to relish the moment of observing rather than acting.
a preacher opened the rally, a 12 year old kid sang a gospel star-spangled banner, an organizer with the obama campaign got thousands of cell phone number through a clever text message organizing trick from the podium. then the secret service guys came out, secured the podium, and there came our man.
he was shorter than i had expected. hair definitely graying. but fiery. and funny. and feisty. and… presidential. i was sitting right behind his right shoulder – when he moved to the left or the right, occasionally i saw myself on the jumbotron. it’s an event i won’t forget for a long time.
needless to say, three-hours of rally indulgence had a cost when it comes to the campaign. we’re behind on databasing, the GOTV plan is still not finalized. it’s 2:05 am as i finish this post. conference call with my canvass directors in 5.25 hours… and with that, 6 days and sweet dreams.
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October 27th, 2008 nick
A busy first day (=12 hours) here at the Sarasota Obama HQ:
- phone calling to recruit even more volunteers;
- an Early Voting march to a polling place in New Town, a predominantly black neighborhood in Sarasota, at which we had burgers and fries and ho’dogs and even more volunteer sign up sheets;
- back to HQ for more phone calling and unloading of pamphlets;
- organizing thousands of pamphlets by precinct;
- canvassing in south Sarasota — knocked on 55 doors in about 2.5 hours (I don’t think I’d be able to hold a job at Work for Progress with those numbers) and had one or two Obama supporters whom I think I successfully encouraged to vote early, which is currently the big push here.
Highlight of the day was running into Jit (fellow ultimate player, Stanford ‘02 grad, friend and teammate of Kroody, childhood friend of Kevin [who was at our wedding with Beth], and current Revolver player) at HQ and spending the last half of the day working with him. We’re planning on starting early (8am) tomorrow and then taking a midday break to toss around a bit and loosen up the ultimate muscles.
The campaign is running strong — while we were working for MoveOn in ‘04 and not the Kerry campaign, it still seems like night and day in terms of how well things are organized. Here’s hoping it makes a difference.
Off to enjoy one of Matt and Amber’s triple ginger whammy cookies on my drive home. Thanks for the care package!
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October 26th, 2008 nick
To top off the free wireless at the Tampa airport, I just scored a Prius rental. It was a $50 upgrade, most of which I’m hoping to get back in gas, as the other cars got dismal mileage.
Off to watch the Rays with some Obama campaign workers.
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October 25th, 2008 nick
Tomorrow it’s off to Florida for a little GOTV work (my attempt to not feel too outdone by my wife, or at least to be able to empathize with her when she gets back) before Nationals next weekend. Two interesting articles online today about Obama’s strong ground operation in Florida one from the NYTimes, the other from the National Journal.
Sheesh, this was a busy week! It involved submitting a paper, a last-minute visit from my folks (who did all the small cleaning things that have fallen to the wayside in my bachelorhood like scrubbing the dish drain and wiping down the dust on the toilet tank — thanks, guys!), my computer crashing and having to sent it back to Apple (thank god for Agrippa — the 12″ G4 soldier), coordinating 20+ ultimate players who are volunteering for Obama next week, answering ornery emails from a class of 500+ students whose online submmission and return of problem sets went shall we say not as smoothly as we had hoped, MVP bussing it up to NYC for the last practice before nationals.
If I hadn’t been using Dropbox, the whole computer crashing thing would have been a significant pain in the ass and diversion of energy. Instead, it was taken in stride.
For those looking to follow the action in Florida, follow this link. Yes, we are the 15 seed (of 16). Nowhere to go but up.
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October 25th, 2008 Johanna
for those of you who haven’t carved your halloween pumpkin yet, check out:
http://yeswecarve.com/
this came up on our national field call today and we all had a good giggle. so fun!
i might have to carve a squash over x-mas because i probably won’t have a chance to carve a pumpkin between now and halloween.
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October 24th, 2008 Johanna
i tell ya, i’m getting skinny working on this campaign.
this morning my body shut down. i thought i was over my cold, but it came back with a vengeance yesterday. never gave myself the break i needed to recover. the voice in my head kept telling me, “in 12 days you can get all the sleep you want and obama will be president”… so i pumped vitamins into my body and kept pushing. i got 7 hours last night (longest in 4-5 days for sure), but it was fitful. then i woke up with a brutal headache and was dry-heaving as i led a conference call at 7:30am… ugh…
(i get nervous writing details like this on the blog because i fear readers will take pity – especially the moms and other nurturing souls – but i feel like it’s an honest treatment of the campaign experience and it’s not like i felt sorry for myself. it’s more just that my body was sending me a strong message that i was mortal and needed to take care of myself for a bit and so that’s what i’m doing.)
i called off my morning engagements, slept until 12 noon when i had a national conference call. then i got in the shower and hauled myself off to a coffee shop for a caffeine infusion, which helped put the headache to rest.
i have spent the day in the coffeeshop and outrageously good soup shop across the street in the funky university ghent neighborhood of norfolk, participating in conference calls, taking care of e-mail, and getting ahead on planning. but definitely feeling like my head is inside a big ole thunderhead. hopefully the clouds will part and tomorrow i’ll be energized, revived and ready to wield the campaign banner once again.
the cool thing is that even though i’m a bit out of it, the campaign roars ahead. today we clocked 650 hours of canvassing time – likely knocked on 8,000+ doors and dropped literature on why obama is better than mccain, and talked with 3,00+ people. so, it’s bigger than any one person, including the state director. nice to be part of a team.
got really wonderful comments from amber and celia about what i’ve been writing here. thank you both so much for that insight. can’t wait for thanksgiving and a visit to leverett! thanksgiving will provide a get a head-start on my winter chub and rebuild my muscle and aerobic base via 4-square and runs through minnesota landscape.
11 days.
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October 22nd, 2008 Johanna
quite possibly one of my favorite ultimate cheers of all time.
i broke it out to my national organizing director last night as our phone meeting was interrupted by news that the mccain campaign is thinking about pulling out of colorado. we just sent ~250 organizers to colorado, who will be working 18 hour days for the next 13 days to put obama in the white house. coincidence? maybe.
it’s not a check mate situation, but the grip is beginning to tighten. obama has more money, more people, more organization, and an increasingly diverse array of ways that he could win the election. by contrast, mccain’s getting cornered. word on the street is that he’s gonna put most of his chips on pennsylvania. but from what i know about the current lay of the land, mccain has about as high a chance of winning pennsylvania as he does canada.
as for me, i’m re-energized by the campaign despite fighting off my second big cold of the campaign. miso soup, vitamin c, cold-eeze, and emergen-c infusions are fueling a strong recovery… and then at night the tylenol PM plays a role too. got a tremendous double-whammy of care packages yesterday. one from nick, with a mix-cd and beautiful wool sweater just in time for the cold weather, and another from susan, chock-full with homemade goodies for the office to munch on. the canvassers (and i) devoured the oatmeal raisin and oatmeal chocolate cookies with ravenous zeal. it was fun to watch…
thanks for contributing to the campaign 
oh, and although we’ve moved a bunch of staff to CO, Team Virginia isn’t exactly chopped liver either. tonight alone we knocked on 5,605 doors, talked with 1.805 likely undecided voter and identified the voting preference of 1,563 of them. in this work, information is power and this identification work will allow get-out-the-vote operations to be much more focused, targeted and impactful.
ok. off to anna-the-kitten and my cozy bed at alex and matt’s. then tomorrow morning meeting at 7:30am and then the little sentra (which just hit 155k miles on the odometer) and i head southeast to norfolk for a series of site visits to my offices in the politically crucial tidewater region of VA.
T minus 13 days. until next time.
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October 21st, 2008 nick
we went to the Daily Show today in NYC. It was pretty awesome. We were nervous about getting seats (they oversell tickets and then fill seats on a first-come first-served basis) so we stopped by the studio at 1:30. No one was in line, so we went and had a great Israeli/middle-eastern lunch at the nearby Azuri Cafe (on 51st btw 9th and 10th). We got back to the line at 2:15 and there were a half dozen folks waiting, so we jumped in behind them. We had to wait about 3 hours until they let us in (BVH and Sarah joined us in line around 4:15). The entire thing was a lesson in crowd management: they ushered us into a waiting room (through an airport-like security gate), gave us several friendly warnings about not using cell phones or cameras, not eating, and not taking bathroom breaks once you’re in the studio. They took special care to seat everyone with the folks that they came with. We got sweet seats in the first row of the middle section. Not the closest seat to Jon, but closer than most.
The studio itself was amazing — all red and blue LCD screens and big ticker-tape digital banner headlines scrolling “INDECISION 2008″ and “THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART” repeatedly. A funny and coarse comedian warmed us up with lots of sex and drugs jokes before Jon came out and took a few questions. None of us got up the gumption to raise our hand and ask any of the questions that we had formulated while in line: “Is there television journalism that you think is good?” or “What’s a typical day at the Daily Show?” If Johanna was there, she would have had the cojones to raise her hand and ask, no doubt. And we would have been better off for it: the questions were pretty lame.
The experience was different than watching it online. We missed some of the key transitions between jokes because the audience was making too much noise and we just couldn’t hear Jon. And, unless you were watching the monitors, it was easy to miss Jon’s great facial expressions. But being part of the crowd that is roaring and cheering as he skewered some of them Republicans good was pretty great: the entire show was basically a tirade against the recent “the real America is rural America” rhetoric that the GOP has been tossing around.
There’s a more subtle point in that tirade in which Jon wears his big-city-resident credentials with pride. As the cities of America grow and out-weigh rural communities in terms of votes, won’t it backfire to so directly shun urban voters for the classically American rural demographics? This is what I found kind of appealing about Bloomberg as a presidential candidate. As one who knows and cares about urban problems, who isn’t afraid of talking about simple infrastructure improvements that can help millions in one step, he might have changed the focus of the national discourse away from the rural landscape and into the cities. Not that it should be one place or the other entirely, but the left-leaning cities do tend to get ignored in favor of smaller venues. Speaking of the short Jew (Bloomberg, not Stewart), has he endorsed anyone yet?
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October 21st, 2008 nick
Along with the new vapid design, the declining quality and quantity of content, the shrinking coverage of important anti-establishment news items (including buying hook line and sinker the industry’s [i.e. Constellation Energy's] stance on why we need a new nuclear power plant in Maryland and ignoring the loud opposition to the plan), the Sun came out yesterday with an endorsement of the new slot machine referendum that promises $600 million in revenue.
Aaron would say that it’s good to be reading news from a perspective that we disagree with. I say: bring on the Washington Post! They had a thoughtful endorsement of Obama, tend to cover Maryland issues pretty well, and also came out against slots.
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October 19th, 2008 nick
Check out the video of Colin Powell endorsing Obama. It is well worth watching the entire 7 minute video — Powell is really articulate.
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