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.

Obama style and substance

The hype surrounding Barak Obama's run for Democrat presidential nomination has worried me a bit. It is highly youth-driven and youth-oriented in a way that reminds of the Howard Dean campaign wherein, when the voting crunch came, those droves of youthful enthusiasts had dissolved into the woodwork and did not seem to be reflected in the ballot numbers.
But Barak is young. He is new. He is fresh and vivid. He is sensationally bright. He is unsullied by the shadows of a long political history and, what's more, he is an open book with a fierce sense of ethics. Hence, he is what one might dare to pun "a Barak-away" candidate.
He told us: "I'm not just interested in winning an election. I'm interested in transforming the country".
He said he sought "a commonsense, practical, non-ideological agenda for change."
He cites his background as a community organiser as a unique qualification for the rallying of people.
"What I have is a really good talent for bringing people together to solve problems," he declared.

I had heard that he was less interested in listening to the sound of his own voice than in that of others - and it proved to be so in Nashua. His preamble speech was relatively brief. After commenting on the public loss of confidence in the political process, he explained his belief in the way "we are connected as a people".
"If a child in Nashua cannot read, we must care, even if it is not our child. If there is someone foraging in a dumpster, it diminishes us as a nation."
While hearing such sentiments of social justice from a politician pleases me no end, it was not what the Nashua people wanted to know.
They revved up when he noted that an economy that was good for Wall Street still left the real people living from paycheck to paycheck.
But when he said that the country was involved in "a war that should never have been authorised", they erupted into a storm of applause.
The Iraq War has become profoundly unpopular among these people.
I have noted that where, only a year ago, cars en masse were smothered with "Support the War", "Support Our Troops" stickers, they are now few and far between.

Obama, of course, has been an opponent of the Iraq War from the outset. One of the few to have dared to speak out when the country had been methodically post 9/11 brainwashed. He has articulated a precise policy for bringing the combat troops home by March 31, 2008 - which, he says, gives Iraq plenty of time to get internally re-adjusted.
Since Obama's style is to listen to and interact with the people, he gave over most of the meeting time to questions wherein people could articulate their concerns.
Naturally, Iraq came up again, a woman saying: "I've just learned that my nephew is being sent to Iraq and I can't breathe. When can I breathe again?"
Obama expressed his sorrow for her and said that everywhere he went he was encountering agonised people who had offspring either going to, in, home wounded or dead from the War in Iraq. He had already expressed fury at President Bush's intention to veto the Bill calling for troop withdrawal. Bush was "obstinate", he said, lamenting the senators who would not allow Congress to override the veto. Two NH senators are among those who stand in the way.

Of course there were questions about health insurance, one man saying that, diagnosed with prostate cancer, his uninsured brother-in-law faced only two options - "bankrupt the family or die". Obama expounded on his principles for universal health care, the two trillion dollars spent in the USA on health "more than any other country in the world" which, absurdly yielded such inequity and suggested that the USA needed to "adopt a system similar to other countries".
An Obama administration would have the government negotiate for the best prices for prescription drugs, too, and not allow the pharmaceutical companies to keep making 17 per cent profit margins, he promised.
Questions from veterans opened the can of worms of the tragedy of Iraq, of the mass of undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder in the returned troops, many of whom ended up homeless and on the streets. There was a question about redundancies to which he said that new bankruptcy laws were needed to prevent companies from going under to save paying out staff pension obligations and then reforming as another company. There were questions about pensions and, extraordinarily, one about gun control.
This is the question the politicians are avoiding post the Virginia Tech massacre.
Obama trod lightly.
He wondered if there was anything that may have guaranteed that violence would not be seen that day at Virginia Tech, or could have lessened it. The issues he saw were that "they are still selling handguns to crazy people".
"There is supposed to be a system to screen backgrounds. The system failed,'' he said.
Citing the use of a semi-automatic weapon with a clip allowing 19 shots, he said:
"I don't hunt. I respect hunters and sportsmen. No one is infringing on their rights. But I don't know any self-respecting hunter who needs 19 rounds. No one shoots 19 rounds at a deer." Ignoring or not hearing interjections that no one hunts deer with handguns, he concluded that there was a need for "sensible laws in place".
That is as good as one is going to get on the election trail. No one, except perhaps fearless minority leftist Dennis Kucinich, would stick out their necks as targets of the gun lobby.

Obama returned to safer ground with other questions, responding on issues such as disease prevention, closing tax breaks for companies who moved their operations offshore to elude tax and more on the Iraq war.
"We have dug ourselves such a deep hole. Ending Iraq is 100 billion dollars saved but we haven't paid for it. We borrowed it," he exclaimed.

When he reached time for the last question, there were hands waving all over the hall. Oddly, Obama chose to give the question to the one and only child present - "a chance for the next generation".
"I don't know much," said the little boy. "I just want to know what do you have that Hillary Clinton and John Edwards don't have?"
The crowd dissolved into laughter. Obama with it. "Are you sure he's not a midget?" he asked. "Is he a plant?"
When mirth abated, he tackled the question.
"I try not to compare the other candidates," he said. "We are on the same team. Hillary Clinton gets things done and does great work. John Edwards has great ideas. I like them both and I think they'd make great presidents...but we are on the same team. We're all trying out for quarterback."