dispatch from the (corn)field

Hi all!

As many of you know, Anne and I have taken a week of vacation to work on the campaign, and spent a lot of time this September and early October trying to figure out where to go--with friends and family in Florida, Wisconsin, and Indiana, we had our choice of swing states...

Well, we chose Wisconsin, and are staying with her brother Tom and his wife Judi and their son Diego in Neenah. Anne has campaigned in Wisconsin a good deal in the past, and just longed to be in this longitude. She was motivated to get her homeland peeps to vote democratic (and to see our nephew dressed up on Halloween!). Neenah is a pretty conservative area, but it has quite a bit of support for Obama, and we're working to get all those people to the polls in SIX SHORT DAYS (can you believe it!!!).

We got here on Saturday evening, so our first activities were on Sunday, when we went canvassing from 11-5 (with a lunch break). We first stopped by the campaign's temporary space at the Labor Temple at 10 am, to get meet our organizer, Les, who is from Brooklyn! Les has been assigned to Alaska, West Virginia, South Dakota, and maybe more...Anyway, Sunday morning we got oriented to the campaign, the local races, typical responses from people at the door, and so forth. Anne's brother Tom lent us their GPS, which was super helpful in actually getting us to the neighborhood where we canvassed.

I have to admit, we were nervous. There were quite a few McCain signs posted around the neighborhood, and we'd heard from Tom and Judi that a lot of the people they know around here are conservative. So, with a little trepidation, we began knocking on doors. And we found a lot of supporters, and Wisconsinites largely living up to the high standards of "Minnesota Nice".

At this point in the campaign, we're still identifying supporters, by knocking on doors and phonecalling lists of potential supporters. We're also focused on recruiting new volunteers to help us when we switch to Getting Out the Vote (GOTV), which is Sat-Tues. On Sunday we knocked on 59 doors and found 12 supporters--there were a lot of people who weren't home, and a few undecideds. We left pamphlets for everyone who wasn't home and with the undecided voters.

And we found a volunteer! One of our last doors of the day--after it started raining and the wind picked up!!--was a volunteer named Sally, who had volunteered during the primaries and for John Kerry, and she was excited to learn that we'd set up an office down the road from her house. Wisconsin has early voting, so we were encouraging people to go to their city halls this week and vote; the state also has same-day voter registration, so we can still get new registrants on the voter rolls.

Monday we went down to the Oshkosh office, which is a big space with six or seven organizers working from there, including organizers for local races and the actual candidate running for State Assembly, Gordon Hintz. Five organizers are dedicated to the Obama campaign. We'll take some pictures and send them with our next update, but there are lots of posters for Obama and charts for the campaign, a phonebank, a group of computers for data entry, a canvass launch area, and a reception area. It's a good setup. There's a bunch of volunteers coming in to work throughout the day--retirees, students, former college professors, blue collar manual laborers...those who come in two hours a week every week and have been doing so for the last three months, some who just got involved and are coming three or four times a week this week alone, and some who come just once...the whole gamut.

Erin spent most of Monday cleaning up/sorting out after the weekend canvasses and entering volunteer contacts in the database. Anne did a bit of that, and also made calls to identify more volunteers. It was Erin's birthday on Monday, so we took the evening off to have dinner and celebrate with Tom, Judi and Diego. Then, on Tuesday Erin did more data entry, and organized the campaign literature for the all the local districts (about 20 boxes) which is collated into packets so canvassers have the right pamphlets for their area. She also acted as "greeter" to welcome volunteers, make sure they had stuff to do, and answer questions for people who walk in wanting to register to vote, get lawn signs, etc. This was happening a bit before we arrived, but having run campaigns offices in the past and trained lots of volunteers, we knew how important these first impressions were.

So Erin was able to get a good vibe going up front and recruited at least 4 volunteers during the day from those walk-ins. One guy said he had never voted before, wanted to register, and in addition to giving him directions to city hall, Erin signed him up for the Saturday canvass! Also a blogger from the WI Obama website came by and interviewed Erin and another volunteer--we'll send you the link if he posts the interview.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Anne helped Les "pull lists" and "cut turf." Again, a job she used to do as an organizer - before we had Google maps, internet, and really cool computer databases! For everyone canvassing in our four towns on Saturday through Tuesday, we needed to create the list of people and maps of the area. So Anne spent all day looking up people in every ward (precint), and "cutting turfs" the size of about 50 homes each. There is more to do today!

Anne is having a fun time keeping stats (old organizer habits die hard). Here they are:

• Sunday - canvassed: 59 doors, 12 supporters, 1 volunteer
• Monday - phone calls for volunteer recruitment: 96 calls, 14 contacts, 3 volunteers (lots of people not home when calling in the middle of the day....); about 40 pages of data entry
• Tuesday - create walk lists and turf maps for canvassing: 53 lists, 42 turfs; about 40 pages of data entry

It's been a fun couple of day so far, and we're so excited to be here and focused on the campaign! We'll send more updates later this week, with some pics.

We know the polls look like everything is going well for Obama, but we have to win this thing big--which means that there's work for everyone to do.

And we believe that it's not just about Nov 4, it's about activating the public to get involved, and forming a network to keep them involved after election day.

It's like we're coming out of a long sleep, those eight years of Bush/Cheney that made you just want to hibernate and crawl underneath the covers...But it's time to wake everyone up, let them know that they can be involved, that we're all connected to one another...and that we can shape the future.

Please, if you are not already, sign up to volunteer this weekend or on Election Day.
If you've got questions or hesitations about volunteering, let us know, and we'll be happy to talk you through what's involved.

Gobama!