After work Friday, I jumped in a rental car and drove down from Manhattan to the Old Dominion, which seems, at least from here, like the very center of the storm. We've got a little downtime - a very little - in between sending out about 100 or so door-hanger walkers at 10 p.m., and my scheduled trip to the Metro station to help caravan about 50 Georgetown students who are coming in for more of the same. I thought I'd give a little report, let you all know just what "leaving it all on the road" has meant, at least for the 6 staffers who have been here for two months, and for the 15 or so more-or-less full time volunteers who have come for the final crunch.
Just to put it in a little perspective, each of the door-hanger walkers tonight is going out with about 50 doors to hit. 150 x 50 = 7,500 doors. Just in our 10 p.m round tonight. We had three rounds earlier today - each walker hit about 80 doors on each of those rounds. That's just in this office - one of 70 in Virginia. And that's just 70 hub offices like this one - there are hundreds and hundreds of satellite offices being run out of people's houses - I was running literature and walk maps out to them earlier today - just ordinary people in ordinary neighborhoods running mini campaigns out of their houses - neighbor to neighbor, friend to friend, family to family.
This has been the most amazing experience of my political life.
<break to drive G'town kids to walksites - back for more in a bit>
Thank god for GPS.
So Saturday, we hit 11,000 doors with knocks, which, obviously, takes a lot more time and effort than just the door hangers. By coincidence, we learned late last night that across the state, over 11,000 people walked to hit doors on Sunday alone.
It's now 12:40 a.m. There are about 50 people here, getting ready for tomorrow morning's 5:00 a.m. door hanger walks. We expect about 100 volunteers for that (!!!). We've got plenty of Red Bull and the best NY style pizza I've had outside of the five boroughs. And we've got the best campaign in the history of American politics.
Sorry for the disjointedness, things are a bit cloudy. But two more things to leave you with.
First, Barack Obama got on a conference call to the field offices Saturday night. He was, as you can imagine, incredibly inspiring...you could have heard a pin drop on a carpet. He told us we could sleep when the election was over. He told us, literally, he told us to leave it all on the road.
Second, tonight, the director of this field office called out the staff and the previously-mentioned hard core of the volunteers to gather round in a circle by the dumpsters outside the back door (the unofficial conference grounds when the office is packed). I was privileged and honored to be invited to be among that group. He asked us to go around the circle, and briefly explain why we're here, working to elect Barack Obama. Everyone had something powerful to say, but none more than the 60-something year old African American gentleman who explained that he lost his wife on 9/11 in the Pentagon, and that he felt betrayed by George Bush using his tragedy to lie the country into war in Iraq. You could feel the current that flowed through the group as he spoke. We all had our reasons for being here. But when we heard him, we all knew that as much as anything else, he was why we're here.
Break over. There's turf packets to quality-control for the morning run. Time to drop the hammer. In 19 hours, Virginia will be painted blue. Count on it.