Just wanted to give a first-hand account of an exciting day in the Obama grassroots campaign here in L.A.
I'm a "precinct specialist" for Congressional District 33 (Baldwin Hills, Leimert Park, Culver City, Hancock Park, South Central, West Adams, Hollywood, Silver Lake, Echo Park), which means that I'm the point person in the campaign for a stable of about 40 precinct captains in my area.
Today, the campaign organized a pre-canvassing rally at Rancho Cienega Park (which happens to be walking distance to my house!). The amazing thing about the location is that almost exactly twelve months ago Barack made his first Los Angeles campaign appearance at the exact same park. It was a great "full circle" kind of feeling, four days before the California primary.
I walked over a little before the 9:00 a.m. start time, and there were already about 40 people there. Within minutes, I and the other campaign organizers (all volunteers by the way, not one paid staffer was in attendance), were simply overwhelmed by probably 200-300 people, all anxious to get out there and knock on some doors. As always at Obama events, it was a great slice of our local community, with whites, blacks, Asians, Latinos, old, young, rich, poor, and middle-class all well-represented.
I'll state parenthetically at this point that this is far from the first time that the LA campaign has been literally overwhelmed with volunteers. I've been to volunteer trainings where we had to simply ask half of the crowd to wait and then we did the same thing all over again, right after the first crowd left. We've NEVER had enough paraphenalia to meet the demand (staff members literally horde t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc., behind their desks and in their cars so they can make sure to have them when they really must). It took days and even weeks in some cases to process all of our precinct captains into the system. Anyways, it's a good problem.
Back to the rally, people were fired up and ready to go and actually got a little impatient with the volunteer organizers as we struggled to accommodate everyone. Soon, however, things took a great turn when Tracey Ellis Ross, daughter of Diana Ross and star of the hit TV-series "Girlfriends" gave a rousing rally speech standing on a folding chair with no microphone. Then our local assemblywoman, Karen Bass followed up with another great speech (though I was worried about her standing on that chair in heels!).
Most of the people had never canvassed before, so we took some time to explain what it was that we were looking for them to do. After months of this, I forgot the trepidation that many people have to the idea of walking up to a stranger's door and trying to talk politics. Wow, it's not easy your first time!
We then grouped people by neighborhoods and soon everyone was on their way. I took a street in the Hancock Park area and I'm happy to say that the Obama/Hillary split amongst the people I talked to in this racially and economically diverse neighborhood was about 80/20 with two or three still undecided. If this little slice of LA is any indication, things are looking great for Barack on February 5 in California!
I got back to the rally location and as people filtered back in, everyone was totally fired up by the support they found on their canvasses. The most frequent question asked was, "what do I do next?"
Tomorrow there's a big rally at UCLA with Oprah, Michelle and Caroline Kennedy. That's a lot of female firepower in one place!!!
All of this follows Thursday's debate mayhem at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood where the Obama people held down every choice location around the CNN stage for eight hours straight!!!
If you haven't gotten on to the O-Train yet, there's no time like the present. The hard work of the months-long slog is over; it's nothing but fun and excitement now.
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Fired up and ready to go!!!