How to inculcate belief? How to turn thoughts into words into deeds? How to get out of the doldrums and this town? Canvass! I took our children to New Hampshire on Saturday.
Searching the electoral map for proximate leverage, it is clear Massachusetts needs to go north. We believe Massachusetts will vote for Obama, but we are not convinced New Hampshire will. The state’s track record is red, and McCain makes Peterborough his Bethlehem. And there are all those Hillary voters who gave Obama the primary loss . . . . We didn’t go north in 2004, and we should have. So, time to fill the tank with the most affordable gas and go.
The fringe benefits of a journey together are legion. We get the busy teenagers in one place at the same time. We get to groan collectively at all the McCain/Palin signs that line the exurban roads to the highway on-ramp. We get to change the words to a Mamma Mia song to “Give me, give me, give me Obama on Tuesday!” and sing it at the top of our lungs as we follow MapQuest to Nashua. We get to laugh as we drive intentionally but bewilderedly around urban streets that are a world away from our leafy cocoon, asking new faces how to get to the Obama headquarters. I get to smile ruefully as my worldly and knowing daughters tell me we should have GPS. I get to have a bigger smile when I find Obama headquarters on the strength of a map, friendly strangers, and my intuitive sense of direction, all attributes I commend to my girls. And we get to share an eye-popping, heart-swelling moment as we hunt for a parking place in a sea of cars festooned with Obama stickers, crowding the verges and accenting the blue tsunami of Obama signs that welcome us to the huge warehouse nerve center of the Nashua campaign. We are so happy together. Our lonely, exurban Obama bumper sticker has come home, to New Hampshire.
We have no idea how to canvass and the girls are nervous about hostile responses. Inside the warehouse, we are encouraged by a hoarse, adrenalin-charged, terse, college-age Obama volunteer who power-schools us in the process, dos and don’ts as we stand in a group of about forty other new canvassers. We are bunched between blue lines painted on the warehouse floor, and more volunteers arrive and are clustered in rows before equally efficient and buzzed campaign workers. Our exhortation concluded, we follow the arrows to the registration station and get lots of stickers we can layer ourselves with. The girls are excited at these preparations and the energy and friendliness and the sense of purpose from the volunteers. One guy really gets stars from my eldest daughter when he thinks she might be of voting age. (She is so not.) At the next rank of tables we are handed our clipboard with instructions, Google map, and lists of voters’ names and addresses and information pertinent to their undecided status. We have boxes we are supposed to check off about their present decisions, if any, about Obama, Jeanne Shaheen, and the Democratic congressional candidate. And whether or not the campaign should come back again and again till Tuesday. The clipboard and the data and the questions give us credibility and courage and out the door we go.
Without the GPS but the campaign’s excellent directions, we wend our way through Nashua’s intersections, past MacDonald’s, Quiznos, and Subways, down streets with big McCain signs and small, past a plethora of local race placards and “I’m a Gun Owner and I Vote” posters. We reach our assigned set of neighborhood streets and decide where to park the car so we can hit the most houses most efficiently. We all get out of the car, Obama hats and pins and stickers labeling us out loud. That in itself is liberating, as I have been conscious in some of my regular daily doings about when I wear my Obama shirt and when I don’t. My bumper sticker and yard signs always speak for me, but the loud, silent disapproval of too much political opining sticking out makes me wary in dress with some fellow parents and neighbors.
Our first house to approach is very small, like all the others we will knock at, if it is a house and not a row of apartment doors in subsidized housing. Our target neighborhood is mixed with working poor and unemployed, retired or otherwise - elderly, young singles and couples, middle-aged with families, older parents living with grown children - and small outposts of slightly nicer properties with day-after Halloween decorations and clear evidence of childhood streets and dreams and the deep imprint of one archetype of American life. The benefits of this journey for our girls are looking pretty interesting now.
We open the gate in the chain link fence and walk up the short concrete path between two small brown strips of grass and ring the bell. This bell, unlike many we will try to ring, works. There is a small yard, claimed and defined by the fence on three sides. Cars on the busy street behind us whiz by and we feel a little unprepared, despite our marching orders and printed instructions. We were told not read off our script, but to speak naturally and openly, so I scan the notes again quickly before the door opens. It does and a wry and sleepy face of forced patience assesses our cheery tentativeness. He knows why we are there and he says the campaign has been there many times in the last week. He is in his late twenties, as is the woman voter who lives there as well, and he says they are still deciding and probably won’t make up their minds until they get into the booth. We remember then to introduce ourselves and we make some hopeful and encouraging statements and wish him well. Then we consult the clipboard and check him and his housemate off as still undecided, dooming them to more visits from volunteers in the next two days. We feel unsatisfied, but at least proud to have done one house and we leave, forgetting to give him the packet of voter pamphlets we have for every house.
Chagrined by our first less-than-successful encounter, we turn the corner and begin the next street in new earnest.
To be continued with tales of myriad moments of closed doors, open doors, and four hours of door-knocking democracy in action with elemental encounters with fellow Americans - and how we learned later that there were 2000 volunteers so far by the time we turned in our clipboard -
