My husband D. and I used to live in West Lafayette, Indiana but moved away twelve years ago because we found the conservatism and the overt and covert racism untenable. D. continues to work there, and this past week, I took time off work to go spend a few days with him there. As planned, I visited the Indiana for Change office in downtown Lafayette to see if I could volunteer. It turned out that they are desperate for volunteers. Democrats there are a little nervous about wearing their politics on their sleeve, a little like what Republicans must feel in Hyde Park (if Hyde Parkers carried guns and Bibles). While West Lafayette, a university town, has a thriving liberal population (though no one would ever confuse it for Berkeley, California, Ann Arbor, Michigan or even Bloomington, Indiana), Lafayette, which is across the Wabash River from West Lafayette, and Tippecanoe County as a whole are more representative of the rest of Indiana in their conservatism. Tippecanoe is pretty much all farmland with a few factories such as Caterpillar, John Deere, and Isuzu clustered close to Lafayette, the county seat. It looks like what you’d imagine the heartland of America to look like – fields and fields of corn and Wal-Marts -- and when you talk to people, you begin to understand how someone like George W. Bush got elected and reelected.On all three days, I was asked to make phone calls to the “undecideds”, the ones who weren’t sure who they were going to vote for in November. Almost everyone on my list was over 55 years old, some in their 80’s and even their 90’s. (That’s a change from Chicago – you just don’t see as many older people in the city).
Day One was a little depressing. I got a few who said they were voting for McCain, a few who were going to vote for Obama, and a great many who were actually undecided. But I made the mistake early on of engaging a McCain supporter in conversation and that what really shook me up. The directive from the campaign is that you ask the person you’ve called if they’ve decided who they’re going to vote for, and if they say McCain (or any candidate other than Obama), you thank them for their time/wish them a nice day, and end the conversation. The idea isn’t to waste time attempting to convert a McCain supporter to an Obama supporter but to engage a genuinely undecided person in conversation and discuss the issues that matter to them. This guy I called told me that he thought he was maybe going to vote for McCain. I heard the ‘maybe’ and asked him if he had any questions about Obama’s stand on any issues. Oh my god. He took off on me! I was able to answer his mostly rhetorical questions (about drilling for oil and about his misconception that Obama was a product of Chicago machine politics) but of course he wasn’t actually looking for answers, just someone to direct his dripping snarkiness at. Finally when he compared Obama’s rise to the rise of the Third Reich, I’d heard enough and said goodbye. Welcome to the real world.The rest of the over one hundred people I spoke to weren’t so nasty and full of invective. I had some very eye-opening conversations that were sometimes very encouraging, sometimes funny, sometimes very touching even, and sometimes just very, very telling. As I said earlier almost all of these conversations were with people over 55. Here are some of the people I spoke to:
• A Hillary supporter who liked Palin. She felt that women should stick together, that Palin was likeable, that she wasn’t really that inexperienced, and, “I don’t know, I just like her.”
• A man in his 90’s who was looking after his wife who was recovering from surgery. He himself had just gone through chemotherapy. He told me that someone needed to come get his ballot because he couldn’t get away, and that they’d also need to help him fill it out because he couldn’t read or write.
• A woman who wasn’t going to think about it until election day because she always made up her mind on her way to the polls every election year. A kind of time-honored ritual?
• “Ask me on Friday, honey, and I’ll know better!” (Friday being the day after the Vice-Presidential debate).
• “I can’t stand that idiot, Biden!”
• A few people who weren’t going to vote because they didn’t like either one of them. I was reminded that in 2000, a lot of people didn’t vote because they didn’t like either Bush or Gore, and look what happened.
• A woman who liked both McCain and Obama and kept switching her support every other day. I jokingly told her that on a day that she feels like voting for Obama, she should go over to the Tippecanoe Courthouse and cast an early ballot… but only on a day that she feels like voting for Obama, not any other day.
• A woman who wasn’t sure who she was going to vote for but she was really worried about social security because she was getting ready to retire.
• Many, many people who were worried about the economy but didn’t understand a thing about what caused this crisis.
• “I vote straight Democrat”. I got a few of these. One person wanted an Obama-Biden lawn sign for his front yard because he lived on a prominent thoroughfare.
• “Oh, I’m a Democrat dear. I’m 94 years old and I’ve always been a Democrat.” And she very sweetly thanked me for my efforts. That was a first (and a last)!
• “I’m voting for McCain.” Not as many as I expected actually! My favorite McCain-supporter line after my usual greeting, “This is Mona and I’m a volunteer with the Barack Obama campaign”: “Well, I’m sure sorry to hear that, honey. I don’t want to hear one more thing about that man.” (Hoosiers have a very southern accent, by the way, so read that again).
• “I don’t know who I’m going to vote for. I don’t like McCain, but my religion prevents me from voting for anyone who won’t put his hand on the Bible.” That was a reference to the myth that Obama would not use a Bible for his Senate swearing-in ceremony.
• “I have cancer and I can’t talk to you about this.” I unfortunately heard this more than once. One of them actually did want someone to talk to. It’s one thing to know what a politician wants to do about health care, but it’s another thing entirely to hear a 75-year-old cancer patient worry out loud about her bills.
• A woman who was very worried about the economy but yet when we talked about the war, said, “Think of where we’d be if we hadn’t gone into Iraq.” She still equated the Iraq war with fighting terrorism but didn’t equate spending $10 billion a month on the war with the $4 trillion budget deficit.
• Countless people who agreed with me that there were too many Americans dying in Iraq and who told me of people they knew whose sons/daughters died. Countless people who agreed that we had gone into the wrong country but weren’t entirely sure what to make of that. There were a lot of people, I noticed, who were eager to talk about the war and, surprisingly, who also listened very carefully too.
And then there were these “mystery” people of which I counted 3 or 4:
• “No, there are no particular political issues but just something I’m not going to share with you.”
Oh… you mean like race?
