THE DARK SIDE
At first I started watching the clock about dinner time. We worked the “Obama for Change” campaign in St. Cloud Minnesota from nine in the morning until nine at night. At first it was only about three or four hours I had to survive after my psyche started sinking. As the weeks went by, I began checking the time earlier and earlier in the day making the afternoons seem longer. It didn’t help that daylight savings time ended mid-campaign so that dusk and darkness came an hour earlier. Add that to the wait.
A political campaign is about contact. It starts out putting every registered voter in the target area – a district, a precinct, a geographical conglomerate – in your sights. In our campaign, encompassing a portion of central Minnesota, we had seventeen thousand registered senior citizens. Most of them ultra conservative, a vast majority of them very vocal advocates of the McCain/Palin ticket. They were my focus.
A formidable challenge to me, a lakefront liberal never tainted by a conservative thought in her adult life, they were mine to bring into my Obama fold. What was an exciting challenge at breakfast time became a numbers game at noon and by six, looking at the piles of pages of still unattended names, addresses and phone numbers, a debilitating exercise. By eight it seemed purposeless and I often spent that last hour making tidy the mess atop my desk the day had created.
Clicking off the hours, then the minutes innerved me, like stepping on rocks across a surging stream. Every night I somehow reached the other shore and would drive to my basement room in a grand house, on loan to me by a candidate for the Minnesota House. With no television, only the local NPR radio station and a spectrum full of right-wing radio commentators, I had no idea how the rest of the world was faring. All I knew was that I was tired and was often in my pj’s, under the covers by nine-thirty, asleep by ten.
But being in bed, asleep, by such an early hour of course springs you to life early in the morning, not so much rested but alert. I started out the day with burning eyes, a headache and nothing ahead of me but what had gone the day before. I missed my Chicago sunrises, my floppy down pillow, my heavy comforter, my deciding whether I would move out of bed or not. Eventually, I began counting the hours until the day ended as I stirred up my oatmeal and peeled my banana, my standard every morning, morning after morning.
Some breaks alleviated my clock watch. Halloween brought bags of candy to balance out the donuts and pizza I lived on during the day. Howard Dean dropped in for a visit. Al Franken was a steady. Seniors befriended me. The Obama paid staff began accepting me, old enough to be their grandmother, as cool enough to participate in their conversations. The hours passed. The days passed. And finally, the weeks passed and it was time to go home, job done, candidate elected. So I went into the night, swiftly and surely south toward Obama-land where thousands of disciplined well-wishers gathered in my beautiful backyard park. I cried all the way down I-94.
Now I am counting the hours until January 20.
