Today my fiancee and I flew home from Chicago to Seattle. We left on the early flight so I could get back in time to go to the Seahawks-Eagles game.
We live right next door to the stadium (and I mean literally next door- for the Seattlites here, if you go out of FX McRory's and walk south on Occidental towards the stadiums, our building is that one on the right hand side) so it's about 90 seconds out the back door of our building to the NE gates of Qwest Field.
The Hawks were... well, getting thumped. So after the third quarter, I told my buddy "I'm leaving, this is pathetic; I'm going to hand out the rest of my Obama swag" and went home.
So when I got home, GG (my fiancee) was a bit surprised; when I said "we're getting killed, let's hand out the rest of the Obama stuff" she was enthusiastic.
I had bought a "campus support pack" which included a bunch of rally signs, hundreds of stickers, buttons, etc. I had about 35 signs left, 500 stickers, 40 buttons.
My dog, Indiana the Wonder Dog, is quite possibly the coolest dog in the world- he's made of pure love. Give him some attention and he's yours. So naturally we put his backpack on, attached a couple of Obama signs, and headed out.
It was AWESOME! We blew through all the stickers inside of 30 minutes, catching the large crowd as they came out of the stadium.
People were posing with Indy for pictures and at least a couple dozen times we heard people say "hey, check out the Obama Dog!"
There was an occasional downside, of course; at least three McCain fans said "can I have a sticker" and then ripped them into pieces in front of us. Um, whatever, losers.
One guy was leaning McCain but said he was still kind of undecided, so I chatted with him for a bit. I don't know if he'll switch sides but he did say that he admired that we told everyone to vote without asking whether they were going for Obama or not.
The Hawks draw a moderate number of Canadians, driving down from Vancouver; a lot of them wanted stickers, which we happily handed out. I mentioned that after we got Obama in, we'd help them get rid of Harper, and they were duly impressed and thanked me for even knowing who their PM was.
All in all, it wasn't much- two people acting totally on the spur of the moment to try and encourage everyone to vote on Tuesday. Many folks mentioned that they'd voted already (Washington has easy absentee voting) but plenty hadn't yet voted.
I hadn't really done much for GOTV in years; these days I mostly just blog (I write a blog about the FAA that draws ~1500 reads a day, so that's better than nothing!). This time, though, I just felt it really important to Do More- and hopefully you're feeling it too.
If you're shy about it, though- give it a shot. And if you happen to have a really cool golden retriever, strap a couple of Obama signs onto him and take him with- it'll make people a lot friendlier and happy!
But even if you can't do anything other than email your friends and family, urging them to vote (and asking politely for a vote for Obama) then please, please, PLEASE do that.