THE OLD FOLKS CAMPAIGN
Walking into the Obama for Change campaign headquarters in St. Cloud Minnesota was like appearing in the chapter room of a Midwest fraternity. Like a displaced housemother. Old. Weathered. Worn. The boys all looked up. They in their tattered jeans, their backwards baseball hats, their layered tees, their hair over their eyebrows and down their necks, their slim, buttless bodies. The Obama for Change staff.
“I am your deputy field director, sent up from the Chicago headquarters.” I announced.
Sure I was. This crew needed a deputy field director like I needed a prom dress. Laid back, grunting greetings, back to their laptops they turned. So much for sociability. It would take all the energy I could muster just to appear as cool as they.
“Is John Sylvester here?” He was in charge. He was expecting me. He would settle me in. Not so.
“Yeah, he’s back there,” indicating with a nod of a backward baseball capped head.
“Back there” was a dark sectioned off miniscule of an office with one desk claimed by a permanent campaign director for a state-wide candidate and a table capable of holding two feet, connected to two legs that held a laptop into which an intense face peered. John Sylvester. The St. Cloud Minnesota Obama for Change campaign field director faced with the most conservative electorate the state contained.
That’s why I was there. I had wanted St. Paul or Minneapolis, two prime cities in this battleground state. “Too liberal for you.” They said in Chicago and in St. Paul. “We need you in St. Cloud.”
“Oh well, one saint is as good as another,” I thought, wondering who the hell was St. Cloud and what could he/she be the patron of?
I found out. Pro Lifers. The city was overrun with them.
I became the baby-killer. Didn’t matter that I was against killing Iraqi babies, against killing felons, against lynching, against genocide. This was a one-issue town and we, the boys and I, were to bring in the vote for Obama in spite of the fact that he held a complicated stand on the issue. I had five weeks.
“So what can I do to help you?” I asked. John looked around, perplexed. He had never had a deputy field director, nor did he know what they were capable of doing. I didn’t know what I was capable of doing.
“Why don’t you fill those bags over there with campaign literature? There are people going out this weekend knocking on doors.”
I am a team player and I filled the bags. I am not an eager team player so I disgruntledly filled the bags all the while plotting my return to Chicago. “I’m too good for this,” I reasoned.
“I’m too good for this,” I said to John when I had finished. No I really didn’t say that. I said, “If that’s all you have for me to do maybe I better go back to Chicago.”
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“What are you doing for seniors?”
“Nothing.”
“How many do you have?”
“Seventeen thousand.” Lying fallow in the fields of Minnesota.
“Give them to me.”
So I became the grand pooba of the elderly of central Minnesota. And what a crew they are. They live well into their nineties. Their children unapologetically live with them or next door to them into their forties and beyond. They tell their stories ad infinitum over and over again, same stories, told the same way. War stories. Farm stories. Raising children stories. Angels in the wings stories. Depression stories. Times they were in Chicago stories. I listened to them as long as I could and then cajoled them into calling the 17,000 elders on our registration lists to find out where our Obama voters might be. Where the fence sitters might be swayed. My ultimate team of several dozen hung on the phones for a month, whittling out the known McCain voters until we had a list of “surebees” that we called on Nov. 4 reminding them to vote. The polls closed in Minnesota at eight. They were still on the phone at7:45 pm when I left St. Cloud on the first phase of my final trek home.
My seniors loved the challenge. They would come into the office for an hour and stay the afternoon. They would say they would be back on Friday and come in on Wednesday. They would take lists of voters home with them to call before their first coffees of the day.
My phone duties were of another sort. I was given lists of potential volunteers over 60 that I called to entice them into the office to do the actual voter calling. I went through five lists, each a little broader than the one before. They had mundane names – like ”Senior Calls” and “MK’s AM calling” and MK’s AM calls” and MK’s Senior Calls.” Then they got frantic when I went into some zippity do category like MK’s sassy jazz that I have forgotten, so silly it was. I went through that one too but by that time I had seniors coming out of the woodwork to help get our guy elected.
Because of the constant calling, my voice is gone. It may never come back without major throat therapy. At first I lost it about six each day. Then it began giving out earlier and earlier. By the end of my five week stint I was horse before noon. I lived on Fisherman’s Friend Cough Suppressant Lozenges by day and Tylenol PM by night. Most women need to smoke cigarettes and drink whisky to achieve a voice like mine. But unlike smoking, the St. Cloud campaign didn’t shorten my life. It gave me new heroes – ninety-year-old heroes. Like the woman who called “the boys” early the morning of Nov. 3. “I am dying of cancer. The last thing I want to do in life is vote for Barack Obama. I don’t get around much. Can you help me?” The boys shrugged and looked at me, champion of the old and dying.
“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll take her to the county building so she can register absentee.” Minnesota’s version of early voting is by absentee voting application, filled out and traded for a ballot. I drove around to her senior housing, met her in the hall, escorted her into and out of my car, up the stairs of the county building and into the auditor’s office, where absentee balloting was being conducted. Her enfeebled appearance drew the attention of the entire staff, who placed themselves at our service to get this woman’s vote cast.
I was allowed into the makeshift voting booth and pencil in hand I formally asked her who she wanted as President. “Barack Obama.” I filled in the oval beside his and Biden’s name.
“Who for Senator? Al Franken?”
“Oh, no, no, no.” I am a Franken fan and it took every legitimate gene in my body to pass over that name.
“Congress?”
“Who’s that?”
“Tinklenberg,” I offered. Also on my list of good guys.
She said, “Oh all right,” and I knew she had reached the limits of her stamina. So we took the barely marked ballot and turned it in. She sighed and said she could die happy.
Obama did not carry scarlet red St. Cloud. But Minnesota turned lavender then blue. I hope she is happy for that. I am happy – I survived fraternity life.
