Wednesday, November 10, 2004
New Yorkers campaigning for Kerry in Pennsylvania
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
A T&V Country neighbor tells this story:We arrived in Allentown PA on Halloween Day, and were stuck behind the parade on Hamilton Street, the main drag. A’town, a small metropolis of 120,000 souls, in the Lehigh Valley 80 miles from NYC, had many shuttered windows on the main streets, but the people seemed cheerful. Our objective was theAllentown Manor, an abandoned home for seniors (another sad story) on the 400 block, the headquarters of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party’s KerryCampaign, contacted through a flyer we had been handed in passing through Grand Central Station. But the parade just about destroyed our schedule, by forcing us to crawl around clutches of reckless kids and handcarts of balloon and stuffed toy peddlers. We decided to back out, check in at our hotel and report to duty refreshed.
Returning to the manor, there was a crowd in the cheerful front plaza, all members of a poll watchers class, a battlefront duty that every volunteer craved. We were late arrivals, and resigned ourselves to do tasks in the room full of a dozen or two of label stickers and envelope lickers, short of chairs,with volunteers sitting on the floor with lapfuls of material, many of them middle-aged and older, New Yorkers predominating.
But we were needed for a more demanding duty -checking the list of recently registered voters against phone books, for numbers, and calling Information when the books failed. Wisely looking fordaylight, we went into a converted dining hall, where people at long tables were busily ringing up potential volunteers, and hunted for phones. The insruments, borrowed from the patients’ rooms, mostly worked, but the books were largely useless, and our team kept calling Information. The phone company people soon caught on, and most held us to a two-searchmaximum, though some, sympathetic to the cause, let us go on with more. The trick in asking for extra numbers per call (less costly to the campaign andmore productive) was to forestall the operator from switching you to the answering machine, which meant automatic disconnect after the announcement.An important dodge, of getting the numbers of the mostly female registrants, was to provide the last name, then give the street address instead of the first name, which unearthed otherwise hidden connections.
Around us were the experienced campaign phoners, calling people who had volunteered to transport the disabled, and urging registered Democrats to do their duty. The callers’ printouts were 40 to the page, and my neighborMatt, a physician from DC, a soft closer, had mostly positive responses,with two hang-ups per sheet. Occasionally the phoners took breaks, talking about the undecided, which still perplexed us. One caller, a NYC neighbor from Lexington Avenue, in Allentown at the risk of destroying her 40-year marriage with a Bush-supporting financial man, was particularly distraught with the people who were still so flabby in the face of the tragedy that she perceived the nation would suffer with the reelection of Republicans. As for her personal calamity, she opined that her grown kids would take her in.
The day volunteers from New York at 6 PM were summoned to their bus for a return trip, while we stayed on, alongside the locals. One, a former West Sider, was remarkably good in pacifying Democrats with right-to-life hesitations. Full of pizza and volunteer-cooked lasagna, we skipped dinner and retired to a night of wall-to-wall political commercials, mainly Swift-Boat, over and over. New Yorkers have no idea what TV grind they have been spared.
Next day, having learned the scripts by listening, our group was promoted to calling registered Democrats, all day long. Actually, calling turned out to be a somewhat downer, with call-weary respondents hanging up. We hyped each other by telling war stories: I made a convert at a wrong number, someone else talked a babysitter (she was registered) into voting.
By Election Day we graduated to canvassing, ringing doorbells. The volunteers’ spirits were boosted by cheerful leaders, who gave us remarkably clear street maps and printouts of registered Democrats that they had assembled during the night By now tireless Matt was advanced to leader status, instructing canvassers. Never get into a fight was the rule.I found that easy, the hard part was walking through suburbia, for miles of hills, and climbing doorsteps. Our team resolved the problem by driving and temporarily parking. An amazing number of adults were at home, very disheartening, indicating job losses. More so was to find that in four ofthe 70-odd homes visited, adult Democrats, after telling that they had voted, silently smiled when asked whether they had picked Kerry. We exchanged grim clenched-teeth wishes of good luck; obviously the Kerry economics message was not heeded. How had we failed?
By the time out list was completed, nightfall was nearing. Some leaders were still looking for volunteers to drive to a phone bank in nearby Bethlehem, down Nazareth Road – Biblical names abound – but we were tweary of slammed down receivers, as most voters had been called three or fourtimes, and opted to check out of our hotel prematurely and head back to NYC in the dark. Politics is tiring, more so when you lose.
A T&V Country neighbor tells this story:We arrived in Allentown PA on Halloween Day, and were stuck behind the parade on Hamilton Street, the main drag. A’town, a small metropolis of 120,000 souls, in the Lehigh Valley 80 miles from NYC, had many shuttered windows on the main streets, but the people seemed cheerful. Our objective was theAllentown Manor, an abandoned home for seniors (another sad story) on the 400 block, the headquarters of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party’s KerryCampaign, contacted through a flyer we had been handed in passing through Grand Central Station. But the parade just about destroyed our schedule, by forcing us to crawl around clutches of reckless kids and handcarts of balloon and stuffed toy peddlers. We decided to back out, check in at our hotel and report to duty refreshed.
Returning to the manor, there was a crowd in the cheerful front plaza, all members of a poll watchers class, a battlefront duty that every volunteer craved. We were late arrivals, and resigned ourselves to do tasks in the room full of a dozen or two of label stickers and envelope lickers, short of chairs,with volunteers sitting on the floor with lapfuls of material, many of them middle-aged and older, New Yorkers predominating.
But we were needed for a more demanding duty -checking the list of recently registered voters against phone books, for numbers, and calling Information when the books failed. Wisely looking fordaylight, we went into a converted dining hall, where people at long tables were busily ringing up potential volunteers, and hunted for phones. The insruments, borrowed from the patients’ rooms, mostly worked, but the books were largely useless, and our team kept calling Information. The phone company people soon caught on, and most held us to a two-searchmaximum, though some, sympathetic to the cause, let us go on with more. The trick in asking for extra numbers per call (less costly to the campaign andmore productive) was to forestall the operator from switching you to the answering machine, which meant automatic disconnect after the announcement.An important dodge, of getting the numbers of the mostly female registrants, was to provide the last name, then give the street address instead of the first name, which unearthed otherwise hidden connections.
Around us were the experienced campaign phoners, calling people who had volunteered to transport the disabled, and urging registered Democrats to do their duty. The callers’ printouts were 40 to the page, and my neighborMatt, a physician from DC, a soft closer, had mostly positive responses,with two hang-ups per sheet. Occasionally the phoners took breaks, talking about the undecided, which still perplexed us. One caller, a NYC neighbor from Lexington Avenue, in Allentown at the risk of destroying her 40-year marriage with a Bush-supporting financial man, was particularly distraught with the people who were still so flabby in the face of the tragedy that she perceived the nation would suffer with the reelection of Republicans. As for her personal calamity, she opined that her grown kids would take her in.
The day volunteers from New York at 6 PM were summoned to their bus for a return trip, while we stayed on, alongside the locals. One, a former West Sider, was remarkably good in pacifying Democrats with right-to-life hesitations. Full of pizza and volunteer-cooked lasagna, we skipped dinner and retired to a night of wall-to-wall political commercials, mainly Swift-Boat, over and over. New Yorkers have no idea what TV grind they have been spared.
Next day, having learned the scripts by listening, our group was promoted to calling registered Democrats, all day long. Actually, calling turned out to be a somewhat downer, with call-weary respondents hanging up. We hyped each other by telling war stories: I made a convert at a wrong number, someone else talked a babysitter (she was registered) into voting.
By Election Day we graduated to canvassing, ringing doorbells. The volunteers’ spirits were boosted by cheerful leaders, who gave us remarkably clear street maps and printouts of registered Democrats that they had assembled during the night By now tireless Matt was advanced to leader status, instructing canvassers. Never get into a fight was the rule.I found that easy, the hard part was walking through suburbia, for miles of hills, and climbing doorsteps. Our team resolved the problem by driving and temporarily parking. An amazing number of adults were at home, very disheartening, indicating job losses. More so was to find that in four ofthe 70-odd homes visited, adult Democrats, after telling that they had voted, silently smiled when asked whether they had picked Kerry. We exchanged grim clenched-teeth wishes of good luck; obviously the Kerry economics message was not heeded. How had we failed?
By the time out list was completed, nightfall was nearing. Some leaders were still looking for volunteers to drive to a phone bank in nearby Bethlehem, down Nazareth Road – Biblical names abound – but we were tweary of slammed down receivers, as most voters had been called three or fourtimes, and opted to check out of our hotel prematurely and head back to NYC in the dark. Politics is tiring, more so when you lose.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:34 PM 
