The home stretch

William Safire points out that many of the phrases associated with politics come originally from horse racing, the sport of kings. I assume that the analogy is drawn largely from the sense of anticipation that builds up....This is not the home stretch of the campaign, but rather of voter registration. After Oct. 6th, voter registration ceases (though there is early voting and some same day registration in a number of states, including now OH).

There are six days remaining. Now is when things get more gritty. The offices begin to pare down staff, unregistered folks get harder to find, the whole thing feels less fun than desperate.

Philadelphia in and of itself has many different voter reg groups in it, (six that I know of, not including the candidates themselves). The number of voter registration forms recieved by the registrar has now exceeded the possible number of registrants in the city limits. Needless to say, some of these groups are better about avoiding voter fraud then others. But this is the grist for the lawsuits that lead to restrictive and racist voter ID laws.

I can do the best I can with my people, but I have zero control over other groups. It's maddening to hear the registrars talk about it.

Five more days though. Then on to getting all these folks out to the polls. I've been doing this for about five months. Voter Reg, honey, it's not you.

It's me.

Laisse Faire Cuba

So....we're in to the free market, unless we deregulate it a little too much, and everyone lies a little too much, and a few people get used to making a hell of a lot of money. Then it's a big problem. Because now we can't issue loans, etc.

So now we're rapidly socializing the largest capitains of capitalism. On the one hand, I don't really want to know what happens if we don't do the bailout. That being said, while we're helping out Golman Sachs, and making sure that Warren Buffett made a good bet, I'm in Beaver, PA, where 30% of the storefronts are empty. Where the city budget is so close to the bone that the car I've left for 7.5 hours now in two hour parking on the main street still doesn't have a ticket.

Guess if the percentage of the population here that is african american is over or under the state average. Now guess what their collective stock portfolio is worth, and what this bailout will mean to them. Guess which services will be cut to pay for it. It's not going to be the Pentagon.

In other news, I slept in a closet last night, under the stairs. I hate this plan.

Visit Sunny York, PA!

This town is totally pleasant. Row houses everywhere, socioeconomic difference exemplified by the relative newness of the layers of paint on the bricks and the trimmings. Two big perpendicular streets and attendent skinnier streets.

We stayed last night on the outskirts of town with two great old-school peace types. The fella works for the Harley Davidson factory (union-shop boss, too). She's a full-time volunteer for various political causes, including but not limited to: anti-death penalty (see: troyanthonydavis.org), immigration law and recommendation, peace activism, anti-racism.

She also thought it was good to drink American wine, and had worm composting in her kitchen. She was fine with coming home at eleven at night to find an extra person in her kitchen, and let me spend the night in her basement (2nd basement in two days).

We are registering african american voters on this drive, and one of the better stories was from one of our canvassers (a guy who, according to my director, at the tender age of twenty has his fourth kid on the way by the third mom). He said that when he went in to his former school, it was cool how the teachers looked at him with respect for the first time for the work he was doing.

Little moments...

Whatever works

People are on the ground. Reading, PA is sleepy. Card is maxed, I have $55 to my name, a rental car, and an eighth of a tank of gas, and more offices to go to before Tuesday when I get paid. The pizza joint we're operating out of here has pizza for $1.75 a slice, though. Certainly not on a par with the $2 egg sandwich, but still cool. Think I can stay with the couple that's housing one of my directors tonight, which is cool, but might sleep in my car. Less cool. I have high hopes, though.

Mixed bag on the first night of reporting. Some folks are out of the gates and adapting quickly. Good plan in place for a couple offices to register over 1K voters next week, get up to sending out 40-50 people a day. Planning weekend canvasses at cab stops, movie theaters, rehab clinics, diners, bodegas, grocery stores, the drunk tank, etc.

More rural places need to switch to door to door, which some of them have figured out immediately and are on. Some are basically nowhere, gotta help them figure out whatever works. People are also duplicative in their tasks, gotta get people to focus, and divide the labor so we can get more done.

Tomorrow is focusing people on best practices, figuring out division of labor and doing payroll for the first time for the offices. Plus a conference call with bosses to figure out if we're in the right places.

Back on the smoking wagon. Back on irritating coffee shop owners by outstaying my welcome. What's the proper proportion for coffee bought and hours spent to stay on their good side? Seems to vary, perhaps by the number of conference calls I'm on and pacing, and how close the bathroom is to the front counter. Gotta partition out the money for coffee, food, and gas. Solid supply of pens, but would like to buy some pencils and a sharpener so I can erase offending idiocies I write down, lest I return to them. Good to have something to look forward to for the future.

Hi, wife :).

...the other shoe.

I'm in Philadelphia in an office alone at 8:30, and I'll be here on the phone for another 2-3 hours.

I got the call on Sunday night, bought a plane ticket, made arrangements for the cat, then woke up at 3:30 Am to fly here. I came to the office, ate a $2 egg sandwich from a Philly street vendor, then prepped for about 8 hours. I had a drink with a compatriot who is doing something similar, slept some hours, then ran a training for a day and a half for new folks.

I found housing for all 17 of us on short notice in a hostel on the outskirts of Philly. Encouragingly, no-one wined about the 25 minute walk through a state park at 11 at night to get there.

At the end of the day yesterday, after 9 hours of training, I rented seven cars and sent them all off with directions to cities they've never been to before, with free housing for everyone except one rigged up. I got him a hotel room.

This morning everyone extended their cellphone plans to unlimited, printed off hundreds of flyers and started hustling. I think I probably maxed out my credit card placing newspaper ads, that will begin running tomorrow or Saturday. People met with registrars and got forms, and started seeking out sites to canvass at. They found public places, or stores to do interviews in, and libraries to convene at after canvassing.

So, as of tomorrow, we'll hire our first people in to six new voter reg offices all over Pennsylvania, that someone decided now was the time to pony up $300,000 for. That brings my total offices across the state to nine. We'll register another 24,000 people over the next 18 days.

Tomorrow morning I drive out to some lucky office to do some flyering and find some more sites.

At the end of the 18 days we'll shut all the shit down and ship everyone off. I'll put out any residual fires. Then off to some other training on getting out the vote. I hope I can get all the rental cars back.

a certain level of anticipation

As of Monday of next week, we will have registered more then 50,000 black voters in our offices in Pennsylvania.

I asked an older woman if she was registered while I was canvassing earlier this summer. Her comments put it succinctly, I think: "Honey, you know it. Oh, and I cannot wait..."

Polling...

...is like porn, really. There's never enough. If you're stupid enough to get in to it, you always want more.

Especially in this election, though, it means less then nothing. Polls are made of likely voters. The candidate's base, the real base, is youth and black voters, many of whom are being registered for the first time. And who don't get counted in polls.

On the other hand, they're also the people whose registrations are those most likely to be challenged, and the people who are most likely to be disenfranchised.

So polling is essentially saying: "Here's what would be happening if the party, which is spending ungodly amounts of money on voter registration in states all over the country, didn't actually turn any of those people out. The race is basically tied. Let's talk about it in every possible media outlet, ad nauseum, for the next 57 days."

None of which will stop me from looking at it every time I open my computer.

Sandwiches...

...are an important part of my life.

This afternoon at home I'm sans wife. She's in Miami, setting up more voter reg offices. Meanwhile, this week, I'm opening my fourth office in PA. I've moved a swell fellow who works with me here in MN in to my living room to help with the rent.

She'll have dinner with my cousin, who also lives in Miami. In retaliation, this morning I made omelettes. I carmelized red onions (which she is allergic to), apple slices (thin) and minced garlic, and made toast with good blueberry jam. I didn't offer her any. But I thought about her a lot.

More waiting tomorrow to see if my new budget is approved so I can go back out on the road. Been at home for two weeks; before that I'd not been home for more then a weekend in about 3 months. As my wife and others I know join the election fray for the first time and start the 24/7 time commitment, in the meantime, I'm here at home. Eating sandwiches, riding my bike, seeing my friends, reading books. I'll be back out there soon enough, as soon as there's money freed up, but in the meantime...

I think this is why people re-enlist.