I have a purpose here today. It is to impel those of you living in California to spend some of the next 30 days in Nevada. So consider everything in that light.
I also feel sort of confessional. A bit languid and calm, in fact, considering that the losses in my retirement account since September probably just reached five figures yesterday. So I won't just be discussing Vegas, but also my sin this weekend against the Obama campaign -- and flowering trees and political art.
If, by the end, you for some reason feel compelled to spend time in a swing state this month -- well, you've been warned, so it's not entirely my fault.
The Palin Protest Pix are down there somewhere. First, this important announcement.
Las Vegas
I am the infelicitously titled Out of State Travel Coordinator for Orange County, California (in Pentagon-speak, it would be OOSTC-OC.) Basically, this means that its been my job and that of the four regional OOSTCs in OC to get Orange Countians to travel to the Las Vegas area and supplement the homegrown Nevadan ground troops that the Obama-Biden campaign needs there.
Non-in-person (we need a better word for that) voter registration in Nevada ended last Saturday; through October 14 people can still register in person with the Clark County Registrar of Voters, but we realize that that is a bit of a shelp. Beyond that, we've been doing canvassing, gambling, going to shows, hitting the $8 prime rib buffets, and helping out in whatever other ways we can in Vegas.
We have been asked not to blog about the experience, so I'm going to, um, mostly honor that. I have to tell you some things, of course, to entice you to go there (or to your other nearby swing state, if you're elsewhere in the U.S. and have one as nearby as you can handle) and help out.
The most important thing I have to tell you about Las Vegas is this:
LAS VEGAS COOLS OFF IN MID-OCTOBER
Indeed, the weather report for the next five days has the following high temperatures for Sin City:
Tuesday: 87
Wednesday: 92
Thursday: 89
Friday: 78
Saturday: 69
That's right. This weekend in Las Vegas will be like a day in Huntington Beach. (In some respects.)
Why is this good?
Well, here is a photo I took while driving into Vegas to canvass a few weeks ago:
If you look there into the distance, you will see something that looks like fog on the horizon (I think this was when we were heading into Primm, just over the Nevada state line about a half hour before Vegas.) It's not fog. It's dust. One might even fairly call it dirt. It hangs over the desert in some areas on hot days like a bank of fog.
The first weekend I went to Vegas this year, it was on the hot side. My car showed a temperature of 107 degrees. I don't actually know if that's as hot as it got, or if that's just as high as the thermometer goes. At any rate, after canvassing for several hours in the morning and again in the afternoon, this happened:
Yes, I went to Las Vegas and my sole melted. And, as you can see, that was at least a $500 pair of tennis shoes (cost estimate guaranteed within a couple of orders of magnitude.)
This will not happen to you, because Las Vegas cools off in mid-October!
As I note above, I am not supposed to talk about exactly what we did there. But I will leave you with this as a bottom line: If Obama wins Nevada by a margin of fewer than 50 or so votes, I will have good reason to believe that he would have lost had I not gone to Vegas. (And that's only counting trips more than a month ahead of the election!)
As a bonus, if you time it right, you get a pretty sunset when you drive home on I-15.
The voter registration period of the campaign was critical. The canvassing period between now and Halloween -- including the early voting period from Oct. 18-31 -- will be no less so. The GOTV period for the last four days will be more so. We need people out there to canvass, to do GOTV, and -- if you're a lawyer, law student, or paralegal -- to do voter protection work at the polls (or command centers) on Election Day and especially during early voting during weekdays.
I can tell that by now you are convinced and not ready to go on to the sillier stuff in the rest of the diary. So here's what you can do:
Sign up at our Drive for Change website -- ca.barackobama.com/drivetonevada -- by 3 p.m. on the Sunday before you plan your trip. (You'll be contacted by the campaign on the following Tuesday.)
If you haven't been contacted by Wednesday evening, write "drive at nevadaforchange period com".
Arrange to carpool with others, if you'd like, at this website: www.drivetonevada.com.
Get other information here ca.barackobama.com/drivetonevadaresources and here ca.barackobama.com/drivetonevadafaq.
I am definitely, definitely, not supposed to tell you how you can go up on a given weekend even if you missed the deadline for a given week, so don't ask me unless you really have to, and then only by e-mail.
Protesting Palin
It is my solemn duty as a volunteer Obama campaign staff member to tell people, when something happens like Palin coming to town (as she did last Saturday), that they should keep their eyes on the ball and keep making phone calls rather than going out and protesting her.
I have betrayed the Obama campaign. I can resist anything but the temptation to protest someone like Palin. So, at the last minute, I decided that I had to go.
After the response to my diary on Palin's use of a come-on to appeal to male voters during the VP debate, I had an idea for a poster. So I made it up and printed it. I carried three copies of it to the rally.
The rally was a blast. We have them so badly outnumbered, even in Orange County. Here is a shot of the pro-Palin (or, mostly, anti-immigration) protesters and the right -- this is all of them -- with the cops on the left:
I couldn't fit all of our people into one cell phone camera image, but here's my best shot:
One reason I wanted to go is that I don't like protests being all ANSWER and Code Pink and Revolutionary Socialist Humpty-Hump -- no offense to those groups to the extent to which I agree with them. I'm a liberal Democrat. I like to be there as a moderating influence.
That didn't last.
While I did talk some people out of certain aggressive actions that would likely have aroused police action, screaming across a boulevard is legal. The anti-immigration people, who largely aren't supporting McCain at all but a third-party candidate named something like Charles Barkley, were pathetic. They had a heavily accented elderly woman who, even with the megaphone, was producing maybe 20 decibels of sound while intoning across the street. We took the "Emily Litella" tack with her, pretending to misinterpret her words. ("What's that? Obama's gonna 'Raid Texas'?") She seemed frustrated to the extent should could muster any response at all. Then a man whose unassailable main logical argument was "McCain's gonna win, Obama's gonna lose" took over. He was interesting because at least he was racist, telling us that Obama was a Muslim and asking what sort of name Obama was. We told him to get used to it.
At one point I came up with new a contribution to the annals of political cheering, based on Steam's song "Na na na na, Hey Hey, Goodbye," with which many of you may be familiar from similarly lopsided sports contests. It's simple: just substitute "O - O - bama" for the first four syllables, which of course you repeat twice. Simple and cruel. Try it the next time you're at a rally and have the miscreants outnumbered.
Trees and Art
On a more personal note: I'm wondering if people can help me identify a pink flowering tree that has appeared in Orange County since I grew up here (or perhaps it just wasn't down where I lived):
(The last shot is of downtown Fullerton.)
Finally: my wife studied design back when she was in college in the early 80s, when the birth of her firstborn led her to leave school. She was never able to return -- until this past year. After an almost 30 year hiatus, she is studying design again -- she's playing catch-up in computer skills, but can kick these youngster's butts when it comes to freehand work -- prior to what will be a midlife career shift from business into graphic design. She had a group project to do a collage; she did the right half for her group, which I depict below. The medium is magazine photos and text, images printed from off the web, eggshells, a distressed Diet Coke can, and soda can plastic six-pack holders, which form a net holding images of the poor and neglected at the bottom:
It's better when you see it in person. I'm biased, but I love it. And I love that California still has a community college system that lets people in middle age, who for whatever reason weren't able to finish college or who want to retool for a new career, explore their talents and reach for new opportunities at an affordable cost of $20/unit for what is ranges up to excellent instruction. We are fighting for many things in this election, and support for community colleges isn't at the top of the list, but a society that honors and fosters our creativity and self-actualization will only come from Democrats. So thanks, California, for the community colleges.
And, again: come to Nevada to work on the election. We need you. If you can't come, then call!