Confessions of an Obama Volunteer

Dave Pollack, the head of operations in New York took to the stage to give us the big picture. “Only three states changed hands in ‘00 and ’04,” he says. “We aim to redraw the map. But this isn’t just about electing Barack, it’s about sending him a supermajority in Congress so he can carry on transforming this country. This is the largest field game in the history of American politics. You guys are making history.”

Everyone cheers. The mood in the hall is such that were we to fail to elect Barack Obama the next president of the United States we would all feel compelled to go and find some other country for him to be president of and elect him there.  Welcome to Obamaland.

Two weeks later and I am in a car, traveling south on the interstate into Kentucky. This is not good news. Kentucky is not a battleground state, which is why I volunteered for Ohio. After a quick call back to headquarters, I am on the right road, heading back into the outer suburbs of Cincinnati: rolling lawns, remote controlled gates, neat little suburban cul-de-sacs, and McCain-Palin yardsigns as far as you san see. My first day on canvassing does not go well. Most of the names on our list are not home. In one gated community, an old lady threatens to run us out off the premises. One man sat on his porch and intimated darkly that I “didn’t want to know” his reasons for not voting for Obama.  Finally, we find one woman, cutting the branches of a tree, a beer can in her hand. Will she be voting for Obama? Yes. Terrific. Might she be willing to volunteer? She shakes her head. “I drink too much,” she says.

By the time I get home that evening my shins ache.  “Now I know what it feels like to be a mouse poking his nose into a mousetrap,” I tell my father-in-law, Len, a retired salesman who is putting me up for my two week stay in Ohio. Len is a disaffected Bush-Republican, but not that disaffected: when I first told him I was coming to turn his state blue, he threatened to lock me in my room.  “Where are the offices? The local mosque?” he asked. “Do you want me to check in with my friend at the bomb squad? How’s your life insurance?” He is what the Obama people would call a “persuasion target” but I have decided ahead of time on a low-impact strategy: no policy recitals over dinner, no engagement over the issues, but if he asks about my day—the ups, the downs, the struggles, the disappointments—I will tell him. Its part of an elaborate Jedi mind trick to get him rooting for me, and thus my candidate, without even knowing it.

“I’ve never been so undecided about an election ever,” Len tells me over breakfast. “This has been the worst. This one I’m going back and forth, back and forth. I’ll probably change my mind again sometime in the next few days.”

I smile sympathetically and look at my watch: the actions of a man who wishes him well in his decision but must now go to work.

Our office, one of 89 in Ohio alone, is located in what used to be old pharmacy in down town Cincinnati. One volunteer tells me the owner was shot during an Oxycontin hold-up. In one corner, two printers—cutely named “Hope” and “Change”—churn out directions and maps for the other volunteers, mostly young Ohioans, but also a large contingent of out-of-state volunteers like myself.

“This is better than therapy,” an advertising art director from Los Angeles tells me. We head out into the more run-down urban areas of the city: land of the abandoned sofa, smashed window pane, and eviction notice. Weirdly, not one person remarks on the fact that a British person is standing on their doorstep asking for their vote. “We get all sorts round here,” says one elderly black woman who last voted for Ronald Reagan (“I liked the way he was on TV”). Encouraged, my pitch gets better, my conversational sallies looser. By the end of the day we have racked up 86 knocked doors and 33 voter contacts. There were 31 for Obama, two undecideds: one of them a woman banker who objects to Obama’s stance on abortion. I know what to do: stress common ground (we may not agree on abortion but we can all agree the number of abortions needs to go down) before pivoting into a discussion of what he aims to do for small businesses in Ohio.

“You overcame the objection,” says Len admiringly when I tell him about this that night. “That’s what you do in sales. You don’t waste your time trying to win the argument.” I glow proudly. “I’d be surprised if Obama doesn’t win is because you’re all here. That organization really knows what its doing. I think that’s great. To show up for what you believe.” He takes a puff on his pipe. “Of course, you could say that Trotsky thought the same way about Lenin, and look what happened to him.”

By the end of the week, his street is littered with Obama yard signs, while the Cincinnati Bengals cap he lent me is covered in Obama pins. “You defaced it,” he grumbles. We might have won Ohio but lost Len.