Close to Election Day, an Obama phone bank works to get out the vote. Photo, “Phone Banks in Action,” by Christopher Patterson, used with permission under Creative Commons license.
BELLEVUE, Wash. — The eastside suburbs of Seattle aren’t known for their overwhelming population of Democrats, but my Halloween was spent phoning them up to remind them to vote, and encouraging them to vote for Obama and the Democratic ticket here in Washington state.
As you might expect on a Friday night, especially on Halloween, most people weren’t home, so I left a lot of messages on voicemail. I got one refusal because I didn’t speak Chinese and a couple of hangups (cowards).
Interestingly, the Caller ID on the phone I was using identified me as Darcy Burner, who’s running for the Congressional seat in this district. A couple of people greeted me as Darcy; I had to disappoint them by saying I was calling from her combined campaign office with the Obama campaign (our script identified us as calling from the Democratic Campaign for Change).
So I finally came to the final call of my three-hour shift, to a male voter in his 50s who was listed as independent. He decided I was just the person for him to vent his political confusion.
He confessed to generally leaning Republican but could not get enthused about McCain, chiefly because of his questionable judgment in picking Sarah Palin as his running mate. On the other hand, he had some deep-seated reservations about Barack Obama.
He was concerned about Obama’s tax plan, though it appeared to me that he really hadn’t investigated them too well. He refused to believe he had been the beneficiary of any tax cuts under the Bush Administration. I had to Google the legislation on my iPhone in order to prove to him it had happened.
He really bought the narrative the McCain campaign has pressed about Obama “hating America” like as his former preacher, Jeremiah Wright, allegedly does. “Come on, sir,” I said to him, “don’t you see that line of attack for what it is, an attempt to scare you, to make you vote against your own self-interest by appealing to a nonexistent and race-based fear?”
The Obama ’08 application is available for free at Apple’s iPhone App Store. It is a model of effective technology for a political campaign, allowing you to donate, call friends in your address book who live in battleground states, volunteer and, in my case, quote the candidate’s position statements to ill-informed undecided voters.
One of the campaign workers slipped me a Post-It at that point — “51 minutes! You’re a trouper.” The kid spelled trouper right, too, which thrilled me no end.
The dude on the phone bemoaned outsourcing of jobs overseas and demanded to know how Obama planned to deal with that. I’m pretty well-read on Obama’s positions but didn’t have the specifics in my head, so i turned to my trusty iPhone, where I had recently downloaded the Obama ’08 application from the App Store.
The application has a section labeled “Issues,” where you can read brief position statements on everything from education and energy to job and taxes. I was able to quote him specifics on the issues he was concerned about.
At one point, however, he asserted that he didn’t believe in a globalized economy. “You may not like it, sir,” I told him, “but surely you can’t believe the reality that it exists and that we have to deal with it.” He admitted he couldn’t refuse the fact we are competing in a globalized economy. I challenged him that his calls for protectionism smacked of a fear that we somehow couldn’t compete with other countries. He recoiled at that and started sputtering about Obama’s wealth redistribution. I noticed whenever I started making headway with him on one topic, he’d quickly switch to another.
So I finally asked him to let us settle at least one issue before the call was over. “Let’s stick with this one, then,” I said. “You say you’re afraid of outsourcing and that other countries can out-compete us because of their lower labor costs, and that you want specifics from Obama about job and taxes, so let’s review what his positions are:
“Some jobs may continue to go overseas, but Obama is proposing that we invest our resources, our taxes into programs that actually result in growing the economy, creating wealth, creating jobs. Number 1, through investment in our country’s deteriorating infrastructure; if we can’t move goods how can we remain competitive. By definition, those infrastructure jobs are domestic jobs; you can’t outsource them.
“Number 2, through education. One of the ways we can compete with lower-cost employees is through high productivity, and a more highly educated workforce is a more productive one, and we get that by making higher education more accessible to more people.
“Number 3, Obama’s proposed investment in alternative energy meets two objectives — creating domestic jobs and ultimately stemming the outflow of dollars for foreign oil.”
After a moment of silence, he switched to lamenting the Japanese takeover of the domestic auto market. Sigh. I took solace in the topic-switch signifying I’d made a dent in his thinking. His parting shot: “My vote probably won’t count anyway.”
I replied, “Sir, please. We’ve spent the last hour and 10 minutes debating these issues pretty passionately. Do you really expect me to believe you’re the kind of man who would sit in his comfy chair at home and let someone else go out and determine your future for you?”
He ended the conversation without committing to voting for Obama but he seemed less scared of the prospect.
