10/8/24

WITNESS TO A GREAT POLITICAL CRUSADE
What I learned during an afternoon of calling Democrats at  home

YOU’D THINK THAT CALLING PEOPLE, even for a righteous cause – like saving the country from a dictator – would be rotten work.
     We all hate these phone calls; so you’d wouldn’t want to be the one doing it.
     Bothering folks at home, interrupting them, spoiling lunch, making them drop  the paint bucket to answer a call on the chance it might be the medical lab tests results, or the monthly call from an overseas cousin or the lawyer with news you’re in the will of a rich godmother you never knew existed.
     I was on one of those national phone banks last Sunday for the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign, which enlisted hundreds of volunteers to make political calls.  I came away, after two hours, inspired.
     The excitement, enthusiasm I heard in the people who actually answered their phones – and more than half did – was extraordinary. It made me realize what a crusade we are witnessing – this effort to preserve democracy as the cloud of Donald Trump once again menaces the country.
     The people I reached were all-in for Harris . They really, really liked her, admired her and saw in her a hopeful future that is the antithesis of the hellscape Trump has in mind for America .
     “I am one-hundred-thousand-and-ten-percent for her,” exclaimed one woman, reaching for a number to adequately measure her support for Harris.

KAMALA HARRIS on 60 Minutes Monday night

      “I am absolutely voting for her,” said another woman who was walking not one but two dogs at a park, dogs that didn’t necessarily welcome meeting other pooches.
     Wrangling the two dogs, which weren’t small, would have made an acceptable excuse for her hang up her cell phone, but she wanted to stay on the line, just to talk about how much she appreciated the campaign.
     I reached a woman in Puerto Rico. She had gone there from the mainland to take care of an uncle who was in his 80s. She was a bit younger – in her 70s – but said she was eager to vote.
     How eager?
     Well, she was planning to return home at the end of October, so she could vote in person, and then planned to fly back to Puerto Rico, to resume her care-taking duties.
     “I’m old school, and I want to vote in person,” she said. Then she added, ominously, I thought at first: “I have two cousins in Pennsylvania and Florida – and they are going to vote for Harris, too.”
     Another person said that four years ago, there were a few  Trump signs in her neighborhood, but that so far, the only signs she was seeing were for Harris and Walz.
     “Now, this is anecdotal,” she cautioned me. “You can’t always tell what’s going on with those signs. I’m just telling you what I’m seeing.”



LIKE THE SIGN SPOTTER, I don’t want to give you the wrong signals.
     If you are a Democrat, or an Independent leaning left, or a Republican Never-Trumper, you are worried and have been for nine years, "worried" being a euphemism for being scared silly and sleepless.
     Most of my friends are nervous in the closing weeks of the campaign. It just doesn’t feel right. Harris should be doing better in the polls. The euphoria that surged when she assumed the nomination this summer seems to have cooled now that it's fall.
     I'm sorry that I can’t relieve those fears, based on the feedback I was getting from my calls, which were steered to Democrats.
     And we know Democrats are born scared and nervous, it’s in  their DNA; and Donald Trump’s 2016 victory is a trauma from which they will never fully recover.  Plus, it’s a fact that Trump has a crazed following for whom facts have no meaning.
     Most importantly, I wasn't talking with a cross-section of normal Democrats. Mainly, the people I seemed to be reaching seemed plucked fom a data base of super Democratic voters.
     In essence, I was calling up the choir. On a Sunday.
     The purpose of the calls was to recruit people to do just what I was doing, making phone calls from home, through the wizardry of campaign shoftware linked to me laptop computer. So, maybe the same software was finding people likely to be activists, or, at least might be recruitable, or, as a pollster might put it, “leaning recruitable.”
    Indeed, of the 30 or so calls that got through, five or six said they would give phone banking a try – especially after I explained that if I could follow the campaign's instructions, anyone could. (The campaign holds a Zoom learning session before the calls start).
       One guy said flatly "No, I can't do it today." But then he said that if I texted him the contact information (the software does it for the volunteers), he might be able to fit a shift into his schedule later - maybe Tuesday or Wednesday .
     More than a handful said they already were doing stuff and lots of it:  door-to-door canvassing for “down-ballot” state and local candidates, writing postcards, and doing some phone work.
              
AND THAT'S THE POINT:
     There are a lot of people across the country – millions, actually – who are working hard, pulling out all the stops, running scared, but feeling glad and upbeat.
     Nobody can tell whether the enthusiasm I sensed will be “enough.”
     But it sure is good to know that it is there, and that its real and its powerful.
     And without this remarkable enthusiasm, Harris will have no chance.
     I’m now 82, and there’s a lot I don’t like about being old.
     But I’m grateful for having lived long enough to witness all of this - one of the greatest political crusades the country has experienced in decades
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NOTE: Interested in doing something in the closing days of the election? Here’s a Democrats’  volunteer website: https://events.democrats.org/

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