Last Saturday I was in West Philadelphia, going door-to-door for Barack. It wasn’t the first time I’d been canvassing, it won’t be the last. But somehow the experience has stuck with me. It seems to have crystallized what I have been feeling these last few weeks while working on the campaign.
I’ve never been a hope monger. Change yes, but "change you can believe in?" I’m not sure I even know what that means. If you asked me I’d say I believe in clear-eyed political analysis, strategic planning, pragmatic decision making, organization, etc. etc. You know what I mean. Politics, independent progressive politics, is best served by hard-headed, non-emotional and realistic thinking. Hope shouldn’t even enter into it. And yet...
[NOTE: I traveled to Philly with BluewaveNJ, a local progressive grassroots organization. Anyone in North Jersey who wants to join us this Saturday, go to www.bluewavenj.org]
Saturday, September 27
It was 7:30 in the morning and a crowd of about 80 volunteers gathered on the street by the local high school. It was too early for anything besides some yawns, though as we boarded the two buses, a shout of "Fired Up!" did get a ragged response of "Ready To Go!"
It was an integrated group, black, white and Latino, but still mainly white haired white people. I was in charge of one of the buses, so I called the campaign field organizer, a young man named Mario. I just wanted to make sure he knew what he was getting and was cool with letting us loose in his ward. But he seemed unfazed by the prospect of us mainly white suburbanites working his district. I decided I was being old-school and very un-hopeful for even worrying about it.
The field office (one of six in West Philly) was an empty storefront in a small strip mall. Mario, a 20-something college student from Ohio, who’d also worked for the campaign in Montana, greeted us, gave us a pep talk and handed us our packets. (We’d already divided up into teams on the bus.)
My wife and I took one packet. Our teammates, two women named Sandy and Lois took another and off we went. Our maps led us down Southt 58th street, blocks lined with typical Philly row houses. It was an area my wife and I knew quite well. About thirty years ago, when we first lived together it was in a house in West Philly, just on the edge of the U. of Penn neighborhood. We’d been activists then, unmarried, no kids. Now here we were, kids grown and in college, back at the beginning as it were, organizing in West Philadelphia.
Well, Mario was right. (Or maybe, young hopeful Obama disciple that he is, the potential for trouble had never occurred to him.) In any case, the welcome we got from the people of 58th Street was incredible.
Here’s the scene:
I knock on a door. African American man answers, sees white haired white man on his stoop. A very brief flicker of suspicion appears in his eyes, quickly banished by a smile of recognition as he sees my Obama tee shirt.
I follow the script, which says I’m supposed to ask if he’s voting for Obama. He looks at me as though I’m somewhat addled.
"Yeah, I’m voting for Obama!" he says with a tone that implies that I must be crazy for even asking.
I make sure he’s registered (this was before the cut off date) and knows where to vote. Then I remind him to make sure he turns out on Nov. 4th which gets me another look of pity. I must really be crazy if I think he’s going to forget to vote this time.
And then on to the next door and repeat.
Mario had told us we wouldn’t be getting any McCain supporters in this area. Every voter we could turn out would be a solid vote for Obama. But what we found was something more than that. What we found was something you could only call... hope. It was palpable and real. Kids running by saw our tee shirts and yelled out "Obama!" People stopped on the street and asked for buttons. And a dozen different people asked us, "Did you see Michelle? She was here."
Yes, Michelle had been there, just a few blocks away, the week before. She spoke in a school playground, and with her had been Jill Biden, Governor Ed Rendell and Mayor Michael Nutter.
Now I don’t want to be overly dramatic. This was a poor neighborhood, but surely not the worst in America. There were abandoned houses on those blocks, and houses that should have been abandoned because they looked unfit for habitation. But on the same blocks, there were houses with fresh paint, new windows and well-tended gardens out front.
These people were the poor and the working poor, the kind of Americans you don’t see on reality TV. (Or TV at all, unless you catch a rerun of The Wire.) I guess since they were all Obama supporters they weren’t "real Americans." But they are certainly forgotten Americans. Left out of the political process, without lobbyists, without a voice among the talking heads, and certainly without any billion-dollar bailouts headed their way.
But Michelle Obama had come to their neighborhood. That’s what people wanted us to know. She had come there and she had brought Jill Biden, and the Governor and the Mayor – to their neighborhood. To the folks of South 58th Street that wasn’t just a political rally. It wasn’t just a bunch of politicians looking for votes. It was an affirmation of their existence. The invisible were now visible. Those without a voice now had a voice. Michele had spoken to them, but more important she was speaking for them.
This is what I’ve been trying to explain to my more hard-boiled friends, the veteran leftists who are voting for Obama but with the firm expectation that they will wind up disappointed, sold out or just feeling like a sucker. No one could call the people in West Philly suckers. They’re not naïve. They know the score. They’re not expecting that the world will tilt on its axis.
And I’m not a sucker, either. I think Obama is going to do what he says he will do. I think he’s going to something about health care and jobs and making things a little bit fairer for working people. Or at least he’ll try. But sometimes I think that’s almost beside the point. Because no matter what happens, the organizing we have been doing, the movement we have been building, the (here it is, that word) hope it has created is worth the effort all by itself. Yes, hope can be crushed and turn to bitter resignation. But it can also be a force that lifts people’s expectations. When the invisible learn that they can be visible, they might just expect to be seen and heard from now on. When Americans hear a politician talk about the needs and rights of working people, they just might get used to it. When people learn that they really can participate in a grass-roots movement, they just might keep doing it.
Saturday, October 11
Once again, we were up at 6:30, at the buses by 7:30. This is not as easy as it used to be 30 years ago (surprise, surprise). I was a bus captain again, and I’ve learned to let the group nap on the way down. (On the way back we will watch Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.)
Today was going to be different. We would be working as volunteers at one of four huge rallies in Philadelphia. Our mission, should we accept it, is to try to sign up every single person who attends. It’s a sign of the organizational reach of the campaign (and their fierce optimism) that they seriously plan to get email addresses for 10,000 people.
In the end, they said about 20,000 people showed up. I don’t know how many names we gathered, but we were handing in huge stacks of forms at the end.
The stage for the rally was set up in the middle of South 52nd Street, about a mile from where I had last canvassed. No bleachers, no video screens, just a platform in the middle of the street and some (very loud) speakers. The first 6,000 or so to arrive would have to go through gates and metal detectors before being allowed near the stage. The gates opened at 11. Barack would be there around 1:30. Some people had been in line since 6 AM.
My wife and I and the rest of our team took our clipboards and headed down one of the long lines snaking back from the makeshift gates. There was our movement, waiting patiently in the hot, sunshine. South 52nd is just as African American as South 58th, but the people on line were from all over the Philadelphia and the suburbs. They were that mix of Americans of all colors that we have become so used to at Obama events, but which is hard to find elsewhere in our society.
Every person who signed in got a sticker that said "West Philly for Obama." We noticed, however that there were several groups who already had stickers. Some said "Northwest Philly for Obama." They had already been at the rally in Germantown and now were trying to get a closer look at Barack. I thought they were a little like Deadheads, following Barack around and then I saw a college-age kid who had an actual Deadheads for Obama logo. (The Obama logo inside a Grateful Dead skull.)
Seeing the crowd I remembered the first time I went to an Obama event. Back in January 08 I was still on the fence, leaning to "the candidate who shall not be named." (The wife-cheating, lying bastard.) I had watched the Iowa caucuses and when I saw the way Obama folks were energized and excited, I had a feeling that was where I belonged. My friend Ellie kept trying to get me to join up, but I still wasn’t 100 percent sure. So the night of the New Hampshire primary I went with her to local HQ in West Orange, NJ. And there it was, exactly as advertised – black, white, young old, gay straight (well, I really couldn’t tell, but I just assumed) the movement that Barack had been talking about.
I could not remember the last time I’d been in a room of such a diverse group of people who were all united around things I believed in. Right then I knew it was something I wanted to be part of. It didn’t even matter that we lost that night. I was in.
Now in Philadelphia, ten months later, I was having the same experience, only magnified a hundredfold. As I walked through the growing crowd, carrying forms back and forth, I was struck by the pronounced sense of, well...civility in the crowd. All around me, black people and white people were treating each other with a slightly exaggerated politeness. On all sides, every "excuse me" was answered with a "Yes, sir," or "Yes ma’am." It wasn’t out of fear or caution. It was as if we all wanted to tell each other, "Yes, we can get along." "Yes, we are all in this together." "Yes, I want you to know that I am with you in this."
Maybe it was just a baby-boomer thing. Maybe the young folks really are post-racial. I don’t know. But I felt that at least us old folks knew that we were experiencing something special, something extraordinary in American life, something that maybe we had forgotten could even exist and we wanted to mark it, protect it and treasure it.
A white kid in New York City, I didn’t live the Civil Rights movement, but it was a part of my life. These last few weeks have reminded me that the struggle for equality and justice really does belong to all Americans. It has reminded me that the dream of racial harmony, the dream that "We Shall Overcome" is my dream, too.
By the time we squeezed into the rally we were about three blocks and 10,000 people from the stage. A guy a half a head taller than me said he could see a speck of a white shirt that he thought was Barack. We must have been in some weird dead sound zone, too, because we couldn’t really hear anything, despite the huge speakers on every corner. To tell you the truth, the rally was an anti-climax. What little we could make out of the speech we’d heard before. It didn’t matter. After all, you can see Barack on TV, but you can’t feel what it’s like to be at an Obama rally unless you’re there. We’d come to see him, sure, but whether we knew it or not, we’d also come to see each other.
Saturday, October 25
Which brings me to last Saturday. Just one bus this time, and only half full as we had a lot of cancellations due to a cold rain and predicted storms. The campaign sent us to yet another section of West Philly, around North 42nd Street, a neighborhood split by train yards and sunken tracks.
Our field organizer was s a young woman named Diana, originally from Seattle. The field office was a well-organized storefront with charts and sign in sheets on the walls and a professional sign out front. Diana told us it was the first time a presidential campaign had ever set up an office in the neighborhood. She also told us that about a third of the people in the district were on welfare, that many who worked, worked two or three jobs. So finding local volunteers was a difficult task. One of our goals in addition to GOTV was to encourage local people to sign up for a few hours of volunteering during the last four days.
Our group at this point was hard-core. We didn’t need much instruction or a pep talk, just took out walk sheets and clipboards and headed out. I don’t know if it was the steady mist, or I lack of sleep, or just the reality of what the neighborhood we were walking through. This seemed like the poorest area we had been to yet. Every block had more than one row house that looked not just abandoned but bombed out. Every sidewalk was a wreck of cracked and disintegrating concrete. There was a weird loneliness to the area, especially once we walked over the train tracks. Talk about forgotten places. Long stretches of storefronts were boarded over. Besides four or five bars, I saw one functioning business – a grocery store where all the goods were kept behind thick plexiglass shields. And it went on for block after block after block.
Here was another reminder, a reminder of what poverty looks like in America. Seeing it is different than hearing about it in a speech. Seeing it is different than being aware of it, or being sympathetic to it, or thinking it’s an important issue. I thought about all the miles of blocks like these I had seen just in this one section of one city. I thought about all the other miles and miles of blasted out streets in all the other cities across the country. And for the first time on the campaign, my heart sank.
No one, I thought, is going to really do something about this. No one can, not even with the best of intentions. It would take a change that would go much farther than the one we are trying to accomplish with this election. It would take a revolution in compassion, a revolution in political thought, a revolution in the way Americans look at our society. Whatever we accomplish on Election Day, whatever we accomplish in the months ahead, this is a looming challenge we haven’t even begun to address.
Then again, I was just a visitor. It was a shock to me, to be brought up short, or brought down from the euphoria of the campaign. It was no shock to the dozens of people we spoke with that day, who lived on those streets every day. It was no shock to the kids we saw playing on the street, just like kids everywhere, riding bikes and laughing and asking us for Obama buttons. Young people like Omar, who told us he was turning 18 on Nov 6. He miss the chance to vote but he still wanted to volunteer. We took down his name and information.
I literally turned a corner and saw what might have been a mirage. Eight new row houses, being built from scratch, with pristine new bricks, modern windows, neatly sheetrocked inside. I took it for a Habitat for Humanity project, or something like it, because the construction crews were all college-age kids. And that was another reminder. After all, there is one simple antidote to poverty – money. It’s just a question of developing the political will and organization to pry it loose. Redistribute the wealth? Hell, yeah!
It was a small symbol, I know, eight houses out of thousands, but there it was. Call it hope or the possibility of hope. Change was possible. it just wouldn’t be easy. We’re not going to get it all this time, but maybe we can start heading in the right direction.
I have friends who have worked in other parts of Pennsylvania, the less friendly parts. They had their own wake-up calls, face-to-face with ignorance, racism and just plain hatred. Maybe that’s another thing the campaign has accomplished. It has brought us all face-to-face with realities we had been avoiding, the realities of life in the U.S. for so many people, the realities of the limits of what we can accomplish right now, the obstacles we will still face, even if Obama wins. Those obstacles are just as instructive as the possibilities we have seen. They can tell us what has to be done next, if we have the energy and desire.
I moved on, just next door to the new houses, rang the bell and a young man answered. I could see by the walk sheet that he was 18, a first-time voter. After I had run through the basic questions, I asked him if he had time to volunteer.
"Well, I’m in high school," he told me. "Plus, I’m looking for a job. I don’t really have time."
We’d been charged with finding volunteers, so I tried to think of what I could say to make him to change his mind. And then I realized all I had to do was tell him exactly what I had been feeling.
"I’m a lot older than you," (I certainly felt a lot older, with my aching feet.) "I’ve been involved in political movements before. Let me tell you something. You’re never going to get a chance like this again, ever. You have about a week left. Take a couple of hours. Go down to the office. Volunteer. You’re going to feel like you’re part of something and you’re going to feel great about it. It’s the experience of a lifetime – don’t miss it."
You seldom realize when you are actually imparting wisdom to someone else, but at that moment I think I just might have. I felt a connection to that kid. He said he’d go down to the office and pitch in. I hope he did. If he did he had the experience of a lifetime.