Australian role model

Being on the other side of the world does not distance one from the campaigns of the primary. It clarifies them - crystal with objectivity. Connectivity is all - and so the reports and newsletters keep on coming in and one checks in with the campaign office sites and sees how the keen bean volunteers are going.

And, we have had the interesting phenomenon of our own campaigns here in Australia, our equivalent, a Federal Election - which delivers the Prime Minister in the form of the leader of the elected party.

We have just scored a new Prime Minister - and a government which moves from right to left, from conservative to liberal. It is an unfortunate irony that the Australian conservatives call themselves "liberal".

The election was a landslide to the left.

It omens well for the US and Hillary Clinton. The US is the last right wing government in the English-speaking world.

Around the world, people finally are rebelling against Iraq, economic rationalism, worker exploitation, dumbed down education, inequality in health care...

And so will it be in the US.

Doing the hard yards

It'd s game of stamina and determination as the candidates roll on towards the yet-to-be-revealed NH Primary date at year's end. They must be getting sick of the sound of their own voices. I know I am a bit tired of hearind the same things said over and over - even when I agree with the sentiments.

On Sept. 18, calling for raised capital gains taxes and tax relief aimed at elderly and middle-class Americans, Barack Obama said: "If you talk about this in polite company, sooner or later you’ll get accused of waging class warfare. As if it’s distasteful to point out that some CEO’s make more in 10 minutes than a worker makes in 10 months."

Don't hold the presses.
Those are the same words he uttered when I heard him in the Nashua Seniors Centre months ago.
No blame to Barack. Hillary is repeating herself, too, albeit that she has saved a few goodies such as the health plan details to give the media a new hook here and there.
They are all repeating themselves, except for the ghastly Fred Thompson who has yet to say anything worth repeating.

This is an epic campaign, testing the strength and staying power of all the candidates. Having seen close up the schedules they keep as they sweep through the states and the myriad fairs, garden parties, town hall meetings, rallies and campaign office visits, one comes to realise that these presidential hopefuls are doing the hard, hard yards. Astronauts have it easy by comparison.

Waitress puts the Mitt up

How out of touch is Mitt Romney?
Absurdly!
First we hear the story, reported with gawking shock by the Utah media, of the waitress who dared to challenge the Mormon presidential candidate on the issue of health care. A mere waitress in a mere diner! Not only did she challenge the millionaire Republican but also she answered back and interrupted!
A number of people have forwarded reports of this encounter to me with varied comments, mainly astonishment at the Red Arrow diner waitress's daring. Of course, these were not New Hampshire people. The whole point is that this was a waitress in a New Hampshire diner and she had every right and then some to question this or any other presidential candidate. New Hampshire is the barometer state, the first primary and its voters take their role very seriously. Yes, waitresses and all! The other states pushing and shoving for a run at being first primary state are pissing into the wind if they think they can replicate the educated political people power of New Hampshire. Not that they would care, since their quest is simply to "have" or be "first" - not to improve the political process.
Indeed, opportunities for the likes of the New Hampshire waitress to speak up would go right down the sycophantic drain.

It is quite possible, although not probable, that the daring New Hampshire waitress was a Republican. In New Hampshire, party loyalty is no impediment to asking the hard questions and putting candidates on the spot. Quite the opposite, really. I saw Rudy Giuliani's besuited brown-nosers asking quite confronting questions. I have most certainly seen the Hillary supporters putting her on the spot on issues.
The New Hampshire voters test the candidates through and through.

Romney seemed askance at the waitress's impertinence and his response seemed blustering. He did not seem to realise that he was in New Hampshire and not Massachusetts, referring to his health care reforms as Governor of Massachusetts. These had no application in NH, of course.
One might forgive the campaigning candidates for getting a bit confused as to which state they are in as they whirl around the country - unless it is NH.
Mitt is out of touch.

Yet more so in the things he has been telling the Granite Staters.

"I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman," he told the Union Leader when asked if he will take part in a YouTube/CNN Republican debate in September.

Glib answer, Mitt. But, oh, so wrong.
The YouTube snowman is not simply genuine incarnation of today's voter, he represents a vast and powerful generation. You are just out of touch with the people, Mitt Romney. And you sound embarrassingly arrogant, to boot.

The millionaire Mormon also acknowledged that he had flown F-16s and shot Uzis and an AK 47s.
"They're fun, but I don't think anyone is suggesting that these kinds of weapons are going to be in the public domain," he said. Huh? Eh? Where is this man coming from?

Frighteningly, he is the Republican front-runner and it is where he is going that we have to worry about.



(pic - with thanks to Flickr MittRomney photopool)

Doorknocking for Hillary

A fat folder full of names and addresses, a map, an instruction sheet complete with "script" and "tips and tricks", a stack of postable Hillary support cards and a "Hillary for President" lapel sticker - and we were off on the canvassing trail.

It had been a strange gathering of the volunteers at Number 2 Clocktower Place. It's one of Nashua's former cotton mill buildings now transformed to apartments and when we eight or so volunteers had gathered in the foyer, we were told we had to leave since management did not approve of "political meetings". Having been given a brief rundown on the principles of cavassing, we adjourned outside to be handed these terrifying folders of names and addresses. Hardly a morning's work. A week or two, maybe, lay in my Ward 6 folder - and something of a navigational nightmare. Definitely not a walking job.

The up side was that we were not expected simply to walk door to door sounding out sympathy towards our candidate. The list contained only the names of people who already had expressed interest in supporting Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire presidential primary. Fear of terse rejections, door slams and abuse evaporated. Phew.

My doorknock partner was Aunt Libby from Virginia - a retired history professor and a staunch lifelong Democrat who offset my Australianness with elegant American cultural credibility. With husband map-reading and chauffeuring, I scanned the instruction sheet and decided to ignore it. It was too late to be learning a script. The brief was to ascertain interest and, if it was positive, to ask if people were interested in volunteering in some way or, perhaps displaying an election sign in their garden. If they were not interested, one bade them a polite farewell. As Libby pointed out, we were supposed to say "have a great day" to those who supported our candidate but only "have a good day", if they did not.

Our canvassing area was pretty much Nashua working class - small homes in quiet back streets.
Our first voter was in the garden tending her mass of spring flowers. She was keen on Hillary but not entirely decided. Then again, she was happy to have a Hillary sign in her front yard. She had a lot of issues she wanted to talk about - the exportation of jobs overseas and the health care system. Both things had affected her life. Several companies for which she'd worked had closed operations to outsource to China and, at the end of her working life, she'd found herself working at WalMart and coming down with asthma. She'd had a nightmare of doctors and pharmaceuticals and this had driven her to becoming an expert in all things that had ailed her - and her husband.
She was quite the talker, segueing into her childhood and the way in which people could live from the land and not depend so much on electricity, how you can get an education at night school...
These are some of the most salient issues of this election and here was a first-person example of the political casualties for whom the Democrats are fighting.
However, Libby and I were beginning to worry that if all our voters were so keen to talk at such length to strangers, we wouldn't be covering too many houses.

Fortunately, that did not turn out to be the case. In fact, we found ourselves not talking to anyone at most houses. Either people were not at home or, I often suspected, they were lying low because they just did not want to answer the door. I could relate to that. There is nothing I hate more than canvassers coming to the door.


Those who did come out to us were warm and enthusiastic. The definite Hillary supporters are emphatically positive. Not that they wanted to volunteer or display a sign. But at least we knew where their vote would go.


The Hillary team had told us that once we knew this, the campaign would leave these people alone until the end of the campaign. No need to pester them or waste resources on them. We love them just as they are.

And thus, for an hour or so, we drove to and fro around the sunny suburban streets, being confounded here and there by bizarre numbering arrangements, entrances that were hard to find and, most commonly, by doorbells that did not work. Indeed, it occurred to me that there was a good business opportunity for door-to-door doorbell salesmen.


We only had to bid "have a good day" to one person - a pleasant gay man who announced that he simply was not "into politics". We wondered how he got on the list.

We were in and out of the car, over and over and over, jotting results notes on the list beside each name. There was a coded system for this - but I had not found the key, so I wrote an approximation. We were moving so fast in and out of the car, up and down the streets, trying to get as much done as we could which, looking at the fat wad of names and addresses, barely dented the load.


We completed about five or six streets before running out of time and returning to Clocktower Place to return the folder to the campaign volunteer.

It had been an interesting, if somewhat hot and tiring, experience. It had also been a positive one, thanks to the careful selection process of the doorknockees.

This had been the first foray of its kind for the Hillary campaign but there are seven months to go...and it is all very well organised.