folklorefanatic

I am now working on the Obama campaign every single day. I’ve been making phone calls and knocking on people’s doors trying to convince them to vote for Obama since the week of the Democratic National Convention at the end of August. Lots of our volunteers here in PA have become complacent, thinking that victory is a sure thing, which is absolutely not true, and the few of us hardcore workers have been trying to pick up the slack.

I have a commission-based job to plan out after the election, a NaNoWriMo novel to outline, a request from an editor for a short story partial, and re-enrollment at Harvard (my last chance) for next spring to worry about. I finished my voice acting projects earlier in the month, but more work is coming. It is so hard to keep up with the several blogs on which I’m supposed to be working, much less my RSS feeds to which I am normally addicted. There is never enough time as it is without the 2008 Election, and now that we’re down to the wire, everything is surreal, and I’m just trying to capture and catalogue it privately for future reflection as best I can.

I think the racists have intimidated a lot of our earlier canvassers who were people of color - everyone is so brave to put up with some of the crap people hurl at you. Just the other day, my boss’s white mom took a black woman out canvassing with her for the woman’s first canvas. The first house they approached, a woman looked out the window, saw the two of them, and screamed that if they didn’t get off her property in ten seconds, she was going to call the police and Thre Would Be Trouble. No Obama pins, no posters, no visible campaign materials. It was seeing a black woman on her doorstep that made her freak out.

The crap that ignorant (usually white) people will say to you when they think you’re white is really, really scary.

Als, the word socialist is bandied about a lot here. I don’t think it means what conservatives think it means. Libraries are socialist. The Post office is socialist. The Veteran’s Administration, Social Security, Medicare and the Wall Street bailout are socialist programs. Obama? Not so much.

Interesting links for the week:

· http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008 (where the candidates fall on a political spectrum - you’ll probably be surpised)
· http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/on-road-western-pennsylvania.html (I can say without a doubt that the shocking examples of PA political behavior do not surpise me. At all.)

Originally published at Folklore Fanatic. You can comment here or there.

Come on, Mrs. Clinton. I just…I think so much has been said already, but there’s one really apt post that addresses you and says all of the things I want to say. I think it would be redundant of me to reiterate them when someone else has already phrased them so eloquently, so here you go:

The Curvature - Dear Hillary Clinton

Originally published at Folklore Fanatic. You can comment here or there.