Oppo research for McCain - some Obama volunteers lust after 17 year old girls!
If you're a nervous Democrat, take heart. You don't have to put faith in the polls - I decided to go ahead and put this election away early by going out and knocking on doors for Obama this past weekend.
I haven't done anything like that before, and I was reasonably impressed by the local operation. Our "headquarters" was in the back of our local Japanese dojo, and about eight people were signed up to work the three-hour shift I was on. Two or three people were in charge, and they were responsible for getting 2,300 doors in our area canvassed in the two weeks before the election. At this point the whole point is just to get people to the polls early, find out who needs rides, make sure they know where to go and all that.
They had the area divided into sets of a few dozen names that were all pre-determined to be Obama supporters - no focus on trying to convince anybody at this point. Each clipboard had map printouts and separate sheets divided into odd and even house numbers so one half of each team could work each side of the street to keep the other in site but get done twice as fast as if they went together. Maybe that's standard practice, but it struck me as pretty clever.
Our neighborhood is "in transition", as they say, so we hit both some pretty nice and some pretty sketchy streets. It's not a volunteer job for the timid, for sure. It goes a little against the white suburban instincts ingrained by movies like "Boyz in the Hood" to go up to groups of young black guys hanging around front yards and chat, but everyone we talked to was helpful. If Obama can keep track of everybody, though, I'll be pretty impressed since this sector of the electorate is pretty transient. Only about half of our addresses had anybody home, and only a few of those actually had who we were expecting to find living there. Most that we talked to were at least saying they were planning to vote early, though, so that's good.
The only breakdown in the system was the fact that we weren't given enough materials with the address for the early voting office and so on. We ran out of things to give people when we still had about half an hour left so we could have done more, but we felt like there wouldn't be much point in knocking on more doors if we didn't have flyers to give whoever answered, so we quit a little early. I'm pretty sure they had that problem fixed by the next shift, though.
On a completely different subject, we're going to be moving again in a couple of weeks and I am absolutely determined that we shall never again dedicate any moving truck or storage space to VHS tapes, so I'm finishing copying all of both of our old home movies to DVD. Right now I'm watching the tape of Leslie's surprise 17th birthday party.
Which raises this important philosophical question. If I first started thinking Leslie was hot when I was 27 and she was 25 - indisputably above the legal age of consent, I would note - and I currently think she's hot when I am 36 and she is 34, then it doesn't count as creepy that I - still age 36 - think she was hot when she was 17, right? I think future husbands should get a pass on that.
Also, I should be allowed to go back in time and wring the little necks of all these 17-year-old horndog boys who are totally scoping her out. The nerve! I may leave the necks of the 17-year-old horndogs who look bigger than me alone - maybe I'd just try to make them oversleep on the morning of the SATs or something like that.
Her friends and parents threw her quite the 1991 birthday party, by the way. Among her presents - a gigantic Aiwa walkman cassette player, and t-shirts from both Esprit and Benetton. Radical!
Uh oh, next on the tape is her high school swim meet. That bathing suit is gonna be trouble!
I haven't done anything like that before, and I was reasonably impressed by the local operation. Our "headquarters" was in the back of our local Japanese dojo, and about eight people were signed up to work the three-hour shift I was on. Two or three people were in charge, and they were responsible for getting 2,300 doors in our area canvassed in the two weeks before the election. At this point the whole point is just to get people to the polls early, find out who needs rides, make sure they know where to go and all that.
They had the area divided into sets of a few dozen names that were all pre-determined to be Obama supporters - no focus on trying to convince anybody at this point. Each clipboard had map printouts and separate sheets divided into odd and even house numbers so one half of each team could work each side of the street to keep the other in site but get done twice as fast as if they went together. Maybe that's standard practice, but it struck me as pretty clever.
Our neighborhood is "in transition", as they say, so we hit both some pretty nice and some pretty sketchy streets. It's not a volunteer job for the timid, for sure. It goes a little against the white suburban instincts ingrained by movies like "Boyz in the Hood" to go up to groups of young black guys hanging around front yards and chat, but everyone we talked to was helpful. If Obama can keep track of everybody, though, I'll be pretty impressed since this sector of the electorate is pretty transient. Only about half of our addresses had anybody home, and only a few of those actually had who we were expecting to find living there. Most that we talked to were at least saying they were planning to vote early, though, so that's good.
The only breakdown in the system was the fact that we weren't given enough materials with the address for the early voting office and so on. We ran out of things to give people when we still had about half an hour left so we could have done more, but we felt like there wouldn't be much point in knocking on more doors if we didn't have flyers to give whoever answered, so we quit a little early. I'm pretty sure they had that problem fixed by the next shift, though.
On a completely different subject, we're going to be moving again in a couple of weeks and I am absolutely determined that we shall never again dedicate any moving truck or storage space to VHS tapes, so I'm finishing copying all of both of our old home movies to DVD. Right now I'm watching the tape of Leslie's surprise 17th birthday party.
Which raises this important philosophical question. If I first started thinking Leslie was hot when I was 27 and she was 25 - indisputably above the legal age of consent, I would note - and I currently think she's hot when I am 36 and she is 34, then it doesn't count as creepy that I - still age 36 - think she was hot when she was 17, right? I think future husbands should get a pass on that.
Also, I should be allowed to go back in time and wring the little necks of all these 17-year-old horndog boys who are totally scoping her out. The nerve! I may leave the necks of the 17-year-old horndogs who look bigger than me alone - maybe I'd just try to make them oversleep on the morning of the SATs or something like that.
Her friends and parents threw her quite the 1991 birthday party, by the way. Among her presents - a gigantic Aiwa walkman cassette player, and t-shirts from both Esprit and Benetton. Radical!
Uh oh, next on the tape is her high school swim meet. That bathing suit is gonna be trouble!
posted by Matt | 7:20 PM
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