Canvassing in Gary, Indiana – Part I

The Indiana border is just 5 or 6 miles southeast of Hyde Park. Take Interstate 90 (the ‘Skyway’), pay the $3 toll, and you’re in Hoosier country. Drive for just half an hour more and a gaseous stench hits you. That’s the town of Gary, an industrial wasteland – a steel town that has been in severe decline since the 1960’s. (I call it "the Bhopal of the U.S.", which in turn my aunt Santha once called "the armpit of India", which I guess would make Gary "the armpit of the U.S." It kind of is). The smelly emissions indicate that there is still some industry there, but not much. Little wonder then that the unemployment rate is extremely high as is the crime rate. The population is predominantly African-American (Gary, I think has the highest percentage of African-Americans of any town or city in the U.S). If years ago, I thought it was no fun being a member of a visible minority in Indiana, imagine being an entire town of not just any minority, but of African Americans in Indiana, a state that has been historically known for its hospitality to the KKK.

The state of Indiana has a pretty solid history of voting Republican since the 1940’s (with the exception of 1964). Most of the state is white and rural. But the town of Gary (and Lake County in general), with its large African American population that makes it in some ways an extension of Chicago, votes Democrat. Lake County is also the second most populous county in the state (half a million compared to about seven thousand people in the next county over). And so historically, Indiana Republicans have sought to interfere with elections in Lake County. Their most recent success was the Supreme Court-upheld rule of Hoosiers needing a state-issued photo ID in order to vote. Most Hoosiers don’t have a problem getting one but of course this is meant to target those who might have to jump through hoops to get one. There are those who can’t afford the fee for a replacement birth certificate (if they need one), can’t afford the fee for a state ID even if they did have their birth certificate, are too busy working two or three jobs to have the time to get an ID, etc. (Here's a blog that addresses all this and more). The Republicans' latest plan for 2008 is to use foreclosure lists and deny the right to vote to those whose home may have been taken over by their mortgage lender (and there are thousands of those people with more in the pipeline). No home? You have no address then, regardless of what your state-issued ID says. No address? The law says that if you don’t have an address (i.e., if you’re homeless), you do not have the right to vote. Staying with family or friends? Doesn’t count either because there’s no proof you’re not just visiting from out of state (never mind the fact that you might have voted at the same polling place for the last 40 years).

So it’s with all of this in mind, in addition to the larger fact that Indiana is a swing state this year, that Gary has been targeted by the Obama campaign as a prime target for door-to-door canvassers.

I should add that I found out from my friend Scott who runs the IL headquarters that while employees of Obama for America may not blog about their experience of working on the campaign, volunteers have no such restriction on them. Tomorrow I plan to post details and also photographs from my day of canvassing in Gary. Keep your dial tuned right here.

Back to the Basics

On the day that Wall St. comes apart at the seams, McCain chooses to say, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." Why? Here's one answer on the Huffington Post.

So today, McCain, in an attempt to rewind and replay, has proposed that a commission be created in order to study and assess how this whole economic mess got created. And that commission will look into it and report back to us... 4 years from now? And we will do what? We will ignore the report. Here's Obama's response to that proposal.

By the way, with regard to McCain's economic proposals (not this bit about the commission but the economic platform on which he is running), it's interesting to note that even Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve and life-long Republican says that it essentially doesn't hold water.

Lows and Highs

If you thought phony outrage (over the "lipstick on a pig" statement) was low, the McCain camp is sinking even lower by distorting fact-checking by those whose job it is to debunk myths. This article in the L.A. Times says it all.

It's my opinion that the Obama campaign needs to refocus. It has so far taken the high road and I think it can and must continue to do so, but it just needs to refocus. This article in the Christian Science Monitor has some suggestions.