pith…

Just finished the first day of canvassing for Barack and wish I’d started sooner. Worked with a three-person team on several blocks in the area of 30th and Juneau, 30th and Vliet. About 60 percent black, on some blocks literally every house had an Obama sign. Even in the drizzle it was too easy. I wish they’d sent me to Mequon or West Allis.

All in all, a good experience, I’ll be back tomorrow. They called me three times to confirm, compare that ground game to the fact that some staffer in the McCain camp failed to follow up on Joe the Plumber’s appearance with John McCain. No one told McCain and he had his cheese hanging in the wind calling from the podium for Joe T. Plumber.

Unfortunately, they talked me into volunteering on Tuesday as well. I was planning to spend the day on the couch with the computer, the TV and a bottle of whiskey. Maybe they’ll have too many volunteers on Tuesday and turn me away.

A couple of anecdotes: Yesterday before going to a Halloween party, I stopped to buy beer and the hipster in line in front of me said he was canvassing for Obama, he seemed to be from out of town, he said he could’ve earned 120 dollars but let him go for the night because they had too many volunteers. I knew McCain was paying canvassers but I didn’t think Obama had to, but was gladdened nonetheless that they had too many volunteers.

One of the people I was canvassing with today is from the North Shore, and that office sent him to a Southside office (I was based out of 38th st, a machinist union hall) because of too many volunteers..

We finally got canvassed today, about ten minutes after I left to canvass. He told Linda he was from Illinois, he was having trouble making headway in the ‘hood since he didn’t speak Spanish. Linda was surprised and when I got home she asked me, “They have you going to houses that already have Obama signs?”

We haven’t been a battleground state for over a month and how many field offices? How many volunteers? Out of towners from even safer states? The third in our group today was a black woman from Manhattan. It’s not just campaign money but the organization astounds me, even after the usual confusion of a busy, mostly-volunteer staffed campaign office, the confusion was all about overkill, not not having enough.

When I managed Harold Annen’s student politics campaign at UWM in ’88 and we won, I joke that we did it the old-fashioned way, we worked harder and longer than anyone else. It’s true. We ran a clean campaign. Someone offered us photos of our opponent drunk, near naked and passed out under his desk in his student-funded office and we didn’t use them. I was proud of that. Kind of amazing to see that about to work at the highest level, where I’d given up on that ever being the case.

But like I say, even lazy me, selfish with his time, is going ‘til 8 on Tuesday night. It ain’t over (insert sports or opera metaphor here).

Of course the old fashioned way of winning white male only elections were more on par with recruiting bums off skid row and having them vote four or five times at as many polling places and paying them off in whiskey. Plunkett of Tammany Hall advised the use of full-bearded men with longish hair, before voting at the second place you shave off his mustache, for the third the beard, then a short haircut for the fourth.

Supposedly Edgar Allen Poe died in just such a scheme in Baltimore…

But if the right can romanticize Reagan, I can romanticize old-fashioned politics.

Kent