Grassroots Organizing Goes a Step Further

Wow! I'm so impressed with the online neighbor-to-neighbor feature that the Obama/Biden campaign has! This past weekend I didn't feel like schlepping out to the campaign office, not even to the one here in Hyde Park that I recently discovered, so I decided to try this online feature where they provide you with telephone numbers to call from home.

You can choose to either get addresses in your neighborhood to visit (for door-to-door canvassing) or telephone numbers in certain regions of the country to call. They give you 60 telephone numbers at a time, and when you click on each one, up pops a page providing you with the person's name, address, gender and age, a script to follow (right now the objective is to encourage Obama supporters to vote early), the address of that voter's closest early voting polling place and its timings, and so on. The same pop-up page functions as a way to provide feedback to the campaign. For example, it asks you to click on whether this person plans to vote early, or on Nov. 4, or is a McCain supporter. It also allows you to indicate if the person wasn't home, if you left a message, if it was a wrong or disconnected number, etc. There's much more, but you get the drift. It's incredibly simple to use too.

I chose to call voters in Indiana and thought I'd make a few calls last evening. I got a lot of answering machines which is a little surprising for a Sunday evening (but then again, people might have been screening their calls). The first person to whom I finally got through to said to me very shrilly, "I'm not innerested in a Muslim for president." [slam]. Yes, that myth still persists, and yes, even this close to election day. But her intense prejudice completely shook me up and made me decide to call it a night. I'll resume my calls today, but only after I can do whatever mental calisthenics it takes to 'reset' myself to have higher expectations of that neighbors. And after I can figure out an appropriate response to statements like that. I'm thinking of quoting Colin Powell's response on this matter but if "Muslim" is a code word for "Black" then that may not hold much water. If you know of a good response, please let me know! I've asked people in the past to look at factcheck.org but I need something more immediate.

On a more positive note, the poll numbers are still looking good. Eight more days.