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Edited on Tue Sep-30-08 08:00 AM by tom_paine
I swore and I swore I wouldn't do it. As I have mentioned numerous times before, I have worked and donated my ass off for every even-numbered "election" since 2000. That's three ('02, '04, and '06)
I was a part, as so many DUers were, of our 2006-victory-that-wasn't-really-a-victory. The African-American young lady I worked with (I drove, did the paperwork, and she canvassed) got called the N-Word within the first hour of our Election Day Canvass (of DEMOCRATIC HOUSEHOLDS as part of GOTV on Election Day).
And though she didn't tell me until we had pulled back into the Staging Area at 7 or 8 at night, she was also threatened with having someone's dog sicced on her and she was told point blank to get the fuck off someone's porch, at other houses after that first incident.
Coincidentally enough, in the last six years I, a middle-aged white guy, have knocked on literally hundreds of doors (possibly more than a thousand, if all three even-year "elections" were counted), and NEVER ONCE received anything close to such treatment.
Be that as it may, this tough-minded young lady, after about an hour in which I both performed driving, paperwork AND canvassing/leaving "Dean Doorknockers", got "back in the game" and finished the day out. In spite, as I said above, that apparently her ordeals were far from finished.
Between that disgusting experience (again I say, at DEMOCRATIC households we were doing GOTV for) and the post-2006 Democratic Congressional Capitulation-Fest and Impeachment-Off-The-Table-Thon, I had the enthusiasm beaten out of me.
What good to work and donate to these Dem Congresscowards who, most of them, it seemed (as Nancy Pelosi once let slip in a rare moment of candor) looked at us as bothersome peasants who should have been picked up for vagrancy?
Call it burnout. Call it, as I would, being betrayed one too many times. Call it what you will, but somewhere in mid-2007, I decided I was going to sit this one out. I felt then and feel now, given my donations I couldn't always afford to make, my hundred or so hours of phone-baking, data-entry and canvassing, combined with my taking Election Day off of work and working all day for the Democrats in 2002, 2004, and 2006, no one could fault me or say I shirked my duty to the Democratic Party.
But I just couldn't do it this time.
Fast forward to 2008. Like many people, I am pretty much the ONLY person I know who actively volunteers or does anything to uphold their citizen's duty in a democracy. A friend of mine had been "talking the talk" for a couple years now, but every time I pressed him before on whether he was volunteering (in Sept. '06, for instance) he begged off and made the usual panoply of excuses I'm sure we all have heard.
So, this year, I made him a promise, knowing full well I'd never have to deliver.
"If you go to work for the Obama Campaign, I will do my best to match you hour-for-hour worked."
So I told him thus. Suddenly, around August, he began asking me about how to get in contact with the local Obama Campaign HQ. Through September, it became clear he was going to do it.
Then last week, he told me he had contacted his nearest Obama HQ and was scheduled to phone-bank today.
A mensch, as we Jews say (it's a semi-non-gendered term meaning, "person who does the right thing"), comes through when they give someone their word.
I gave him my word. So now, I have to come through on it.
Tomorrow, I start phone-banking at MY local Obama County Campaign Headquarters.
How 'bout you, DU?
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