Grassroots

Doing volunteer work with the Obama campaign last year gave me an opportunity to try to translate my obsession with reading about politics into actual tangible activism. However, the extent of my work was limited to Manhattan, and it can get a little difficult to get that warm, fuzzy grassroots feeling while phonebanking from fancy hotels or checking in Anna Wintour at a fundraising fashion event.

Well, there's a special election to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, and my friend Josh had been volunteering for the campaign of the US Rep Mike Capuano. I was a little on the fence about Capuano as a candidate, but last Tuesday was the big Democratic Primary and I was excited to help Josh out on voting day. It was grassroots time, baby.

We began the day at 6am, driving to donated political office space in a small city I'd only known of from seeing exits on the highway. The goal of the day was purely a Get Out the Vote operation: Phone calls, organizing rides, reminding voters, providing information, etc. As we set up the office with some munchkins and coffee, our first two volunteers showed up: Two guys from the Bricklayers Local 3.

They assumed they'd be given some signs and told to just hang outside in front of a polling booth, but the campaign specifically had said they needed everyone making phone calls. It was kind of awesome watching Josh, in full "young hotshot politico" mode was in a suit (no tie, you know, to be relaxed), try to explain to them the complicated phone banking system. Somehow we were soon cranking out phone calls and within minutes began getting both lauded and berated by voters.

The Bricklayers soon filtered out to get to "a job", and there was a steady rotation of some extremely random people. There was a 65 year old guy who had to use scissors to push phone buttons due to a lack of feeling in his fingers, the daughter of a local politico who I imagine will soon be seriously on the scene, and a few random older women in business casual. Most entertaining was probably the mid-life divorcee who had apparently once lived in the grandeur of D.C. in with her British diplomat husband. After "cleaning her husband out", she now does volunteer work to meet people and repeatedly asked me to friend her on facebook.



The phone banking technology was surprisingly much more advanced than that used during the Obama campaign. The technology around us, however, was not. Proudly displayed on the shelf was a Netscape Communicator box, now with "Internet compatibility" and to be used with Windows 3.1....about as grassroots as it gets. Another favorite piece of technology I found was a document shredder that had an option for "CD/DVD/Disk" shredding as well....only in politics.







Capuano lost by the margin expected and we missed the concession speech as we rushed to get over to the hotel where the main campaign event was taking place. It was fairly anticlimactic as we knew the results via Twitter way before arriving. I guess sometimes real-time information has its drawbacks. In the end, one similarity existed between the grassroots organizing of a local race and big-city, fancypants politicking. Win or lose, everyone involved in the campaign went straight to the bar in the aftermath.








Josh in fancy pants suit