Month: November 2006

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Sausage Factory

From the “If You Like Bratwurst, Stay Out of the Sausage Factory” file:

Yesterday, Kate and I hosted a mini-MoveOn calling party. “Mini” because we only had one person not a member of our household show up. What we lacked in numbers we made up for in enthusiasm, wit, and sapient commentary.

This was the drill: We printed out voter phone numbers, 192 in all. They were evenly split between New Jersey, where appointed incumbent Senator Bob Menendez is running against Tom Kean Jr., an appointed state legislator whose biggest asset is his dad’s name and a willingness to sling mud, and Ohio, where Bush rubber stamp Michael DeWine is trailing Sherrod Brown, a liberal Democratic congressman. We found a Kean campaign ad online so that we knew how to pronounce his name (it’s KANE, like Charles Foster Kane, not KEEN) in case it came up, and I printed out a few stories from New Jersey papers about the race so that if a voter asked us a question we didn’t seem like complete idiots (of course, Kate is a New Jersey native and I’ve visited the Garden State many times, so we have an actual connection there).

We needn’t have worried so much about knowing the background. It seemed as though the numbers we were given were in a Latino precinct in northern New Jersey. We encountered lots of people who said they couldn’t speak English or simply hung up when they heard the quaint Anglo jabbering on the other end of the line. Of the 96 Jersey numbers we called:

–49 were hangups, disconnected lines, or otherwise bad numbers; we took them off the calling list.

–44 were answering machines or busy signals and will be called back.

–3 were voters, all of whom said they were voting for Menendez.

On to Ohio. After the New Jersey experience, I didn’t bother scouring the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Cincinnati Enquirer, or the Ashtabula Strident Bugle for campaign background–we just jumped in and started calling. One immediate difference: The households we reached were American-speaking. That had the effect of speeding up hang-up times for folks who didn’t want to hear from “Dan Brekke, a volunteer for Call for Change.”

Of the 96 Ohio calls, 47 were answering machines or busy; 27 needed to be removed from the list; 12 reached voters who said they were for Sherrod Brown; and 10–10!–were answered by people who said they planned to vote Tuesday but still hadn’t made up their minds about whom they’d support.

I admit I’m nonplussed by the undecideds. They seem to split into two groups: those who are so unplugged they’re not really sure who’s running, and those who seem at least somewhat thoughtful who are really wrestling with the decision.

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‘You’re Doing a Heckuva Job’–Rumsfeld/Cheney Edition

Bush came out the other day to tell the world that Rumsfeld and Cheney are his guys for the rest of his term. No disaster they author is too large for the president to send them on a permanent vacation. Translation, by way of my brother John: “You’re doin’ a heckuva job, Dick and Rummy.” So now: How long before one of them–Rumsfeld, because the only way Cheney’s going down is if Darth Vader throws him into the Death Star’s reactor core (or whatever that was in “Return of the Jedi”)–is sent packing.

Maybe not long. Check out the Army Times editorial urging Bush to get rid of Rumsfeld:

“ ‘So long as our government requires the backing of an aroused and informed public opinion … it is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth.’

“That statement was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins more than a half-century ago during the Korean War.

“But until recently, the ‘hard bruising’ truth about the Iraq war has been difficult to come by from leaders in Washington.

“One rosy reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: ‘mission accomplished,’ the insurgency is ‘in its last throes,’ and ‘back off,’ we know what we’re doing, are a few choice examples. …” (Read the rest.)

Score one for the reality-based community,

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Moving On Again

Day Two at the MoveOn.org Political Action beehive in downtown Oakland:

I spent about three hours calling today. The drill was the same as the other day: We were trying to get people who have volunteered to call voters in competitive congressional districts to commit to specific times to do their work. I dialed 59 numbers, using my own cellphone; part of the way the organization saves money, or optimizes its effort, or however you want to put it, is to limit the number of land lines on the premises and get people to use their own cellphone minutes. Since it was early afternoon, maybe two out of three of those calls went to answering machines. Just like the other night, I got maybe 15 people who couldn’t or wouldn’t commit to making voter phone calls. I got five people who said they’d make calls over the last five days of the campaign, tomorrow (Friday) through Tuesday.

That was an improvement over Tuesday night, though a couple of not necessarily positive issues came into focus for me:

First: Despite all the griping people are given to, there are not a whole lot of people willing to give up a few hours of their time on the off chance it might improve the situation they’re griping about. That ought to be no surprise given the reality that “high turnout” general elections aren’t wildly popular affairs. The U.S. Census Bureau says that about 215 million Americans were eligible to vote in 2004; just two-thirds of that number were registered. The turnout of eligible voters–with the nation at war, the minority party with a grudge to settle, and one of the most divisive chief executives in our history standing for re-election–was 125 million, or 58.3 percent of the eligible population. To paraphrase Captain Louis Renault, I’m shocked, shocked to find there’s no voting going on here.

Second: You’ve got to wonder whether the telephone, abused as it is by people no one wants to hear from, is really the best instrument for persuading people to get out and vote. Of the 15 or 20 people I managed to get on the phone, only two were really willing to listen to the full pitch, and they seemed predisposed to go along with the program. Of the rest, almost everyone sounded hurried and impatient. Not that I blame them. In the back of my mind, I can hear Eudora Welty’s explanation of why she didn’t stay in advertising: “It was too much like sticking pins into people to make them buy things they didn’t need or really want.” For many of us, the phone has become impersonal, and sales calls, even the high-minded political kind that you may have invited, are grating. You just wonder whether there’s a better, more personal way of getting people to sign up for the fight. (I don’t suppose we’ll be going back to the old face-to-face political machine model any time soon; though it wasn’t all bad: I’ve been told that Richard J. Daley showed up at my great-grandmother O’Malley’s wake; this was 1952, three years before he ran for mayor, and apparently it was just part of his way of getting to know the voters (the living ones, I mean).

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This and This and This and That

John Kerry: You know, a quip that requires a half hour of set up and 72 hours of explanation–it ain’t a quip. Please: Go away, dismal man. Let us remember you as you were in your finest hour: Conceding defeat.

Cruz Bustamante: It’s flattering to California voters that the first words out of your mouth in your campaign spots are, “I was really fat.” Yes, if you don’t live here, you’re missing a real treat: A career pol–he’s a Democrat, for the record–term limited out of his spot at the trough (lieutenant governor) and snuffling and snarfling his way toward another (state insurance commissioner). How ironic to compare him to a swine swilling down slops, because he’s basing his appeal to voters on the fact he went on a diet and lost 70 pounds. It all connects with his hunger to serve the public because he says he promised his family he’d lose the weight, and he did; and now, he’s promising to help us all get cheaper insurance–and he’ll keep that promise, too. If the Republican in the race–Steve Poizner–is not a serial murderer, I may vote for him. (One of the Bustamante ads, on YouTube, is below).

And then there’s David Brooks: His op-ed column in today’s New York Times (you’ve got to be a paid subscriber to get it online, so no link). This former gung-ho Iraq war supporter decides, three years, 7 months, and 14 days into the enterprise (not that anyone’s counting) that it might be a good idea to study up on the history of Iraq to see whether it offers any clues about the challenges the project poses. And–zounds!–it does:

“Policy makers are again considering fundamental chnges in our Iraq poliicy, but as they do I hope they read Elie Dedourie’s essay, ‘The Kingdom of Iraq: A Retrospect.’

“Kedourie, a Baghdad-born Jew, published the essay in 1970. It’s a history of the regime the British helped establish over 80 years ago, but it captures an idea that is truer now than ever: Disorder is endemic to Iraq. Today’s crisis is not three years old. It’s worse now, but the crisis is perpetual. This is a bomb of a nation.”

Later, Brooks quotes Kedourie’s view of the nation’s political future: “‘Either the country would be plunged into chaos or its population should become universally the clients and dependents of an omnipotent but capricious and unstable government.’ There is, he wrote, no third alternative.”

“An omnipotent but capricious and unstable government.” Saddam, anyone?

Despite the finality of Kedourie’s view, Brooks complacently describes the alternatives he sees open to the United States now. Make one last effort to pacify Baghdad–thus, he apparently believes, pouring oil on the restive countryside. Acknowledging that probably won’t pan out, he says Iraq ought to cease to exist.

“It will be time to effectively end Iraq, with a remaining fig-leaf central government or not. It will be time to radically diffuse authority down to the only communities that are viable–the clan, tribe or sect.”

But guess what? Brooks says we’ll still be there–apparently forever. Our “muscular presence” will be needed to “nurture civilized democratic societies that reject extremism and terror.” Uh, yeah, just what the doctor ordered: Having the troops referee the contest among the clans, tribes and sects. Someone needs to give Brooks something else to read to give him a clue about how that’s turning out.

(He might start in his own paper, which features a front-page story today on a combat medic and one of his patients, “Tending a Fallen Marine, with Skill, Prayer and Fury.”

“Petty Officer [Dustin] Kirby, 22, is a Navy corpsman, the trauma medic assigned to Second Mobile Assault Platoon of Weapons Company, Second Battalion, Eighth Marines. Everyone calls him Doc. He had just finished treating a marine who had been shot by an Iraqi sniper.

“ ‘It was 7.62 millimeter,’ he continued. ‘Armor piercing.’

“He reached into his pocket and retrieved the bullet, which he had found. ‘The impact with the Kevlar stopped most of it,’ he said. ‘But it tore through, hit his head, went through and came out.’

“He put the bullet in his breast pocket, to give to an intelligence team later. Sweat kept rolling off his face, mixed with tears. His voice was almost cracking, but he managed to control it and keep it deep. ‘When I got there, there wasn’t much I could do,’ he said.

“Then he nodded. He seemed to be talking to himself. ‘I kept him breathing,’ he said.”

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Moving On

Somewhere in the dim past, I gave money to MoveOn.org, or signed one of its petitions, or maybe did some phone-banking in 2004. However it happened, they called me a week or so ago to get me to volunteer to make phone calls this week. I agreed, but something came up the first night I was supposed to go, so I didn’t show. They called again. Last night, I went in for the first of several evenings of calling–contacting people like me who have somewhere along the line said yes to something MoveOn asked them to do and who are now being asked to call voters in key congressional races.

After an orientation about the calling process and the script we were to use, I started dialing. My targets were folks in the 831 area code–Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, mostly. The goal was to get people to commit to six hours of phone work in the last five days of the campaign, Friday through election day. Since we were calling MoveOn people, the task seemed a little easier at the outset than cold-calling people on voter registration rolls who may or (more likely) may not want any part of your get-out-and-vote rap. I could hear fellow volunteers happily announcing (by ringing desk bells) that they were getting commitment after commitment. A lot of people want to have a sense they’re doing something to effect some change, any change.

In two hours or so, I made 34 calls. About half went to answering machines. About half a dozen were wrong numbers or fax lines or otherwise “bad.” The rest–let’s say a dozen–picked up. Three said don’t call here again. About four said call back because there are trick-or-treaters at the door. Another four said, gee, we’d like to help, but we can’t for one reason or another. That leaves one person.

She began by telling me she’d fallen asleep at the computer while trying to figure out the MoveOn calling system and thought she’d better not try any more calling. Really? I asked. Why? “Because I’m old and tired,” she said. “Hey, join the crowd,” I told her. “The only thing that’s keeping me going is being in a room full of people doing the same thing.” She listened, and after a little cajoling committed to attending “phone parties” on Saturday and Sunday.

That’s my success story. It’s enough to keep me going back for more.

Some snippets from other people I talked to:

“I can’t make long-distance calls because I’m on a plan that only allows me two hours of long-distance calls a month.”

“I don’t have any time man–I’m looking for work.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t–I have a mother who’s in the middle of dying.”

“I’m just on my way out the door to see David Sedaris. Call back tomorrow.”

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