Last Two Weeks -- Make Everyone's Vote Count

Akron Preparing to Welcome the President

Two weeks and two days from now the young people at the local West Akron Obama for America office can stop getting up early and going to bed late, eating irregularly and not well (although I am told our office has the best food in the area) and courting us volunteers who want to help in the effort.  I want to make sure our dedicated Obama-ites have a really good sleep on November 7 (and a fine victory party on Nov. 6) so I have signed up for every canvass shift I can between now and Nov. 6, including every shift between Nov. 1 and the polls closing on Nov. 6.  Want to join this effort to help guarantee the re-election of Barack Obama?  Get thee to Nevada or Colorado or Pennsylvania or Florida.  Or come join us in Ohio to help GOTV (Get Out The Vote).

Keeping My Head Down

One of the problems with fashioning oneself as a social commentator is there are societal events that one would just as soon not comment on. Take Professor Henry Louis Gates' recent difficulties. I wanted to wait until all the facts revealed themselves, and maybe they have, so here are a few of my own thoughts on the matter:

• None of us can afford to not know who are neighbors are. Neither can we risk leaving our screen doors unlocked. Who knows who might walk in and ask for proof we live there.
• Barack Obama has revealed himself to be a black man. Yes, it is rhetorically accurate for him to declare himself bi-racial and that his concerns transcend race but in the end, when faced with Prof. Gates situation, and perhaps having flashbacks to his own time at Harvard, he reacted from his African-American gut.
• Ms. Whalen, the woman who called the cops about the potential break-in and the one person who acted responsibly as she attempted to give an accurate, non-hysterical, not racist account of what she saw may have been thwarted by the police's inability to grasp nuance. For the cops, generally speaking, everything, in every sense of these terms, is black or white.
• The focus on racial profiling allows institutions and individuals to avoid addressing historical, systemic racism.

The biggest problem I have had in the last few days is with those white allies here in Boston who call themselves anti-racist. Here is why. Last Thursday a Boston police officer was suspended for sending an email that referred to Prof. Gates as a "banana eating jungle monkey". But the Globe reported on Friday that this is just one of a recent string of racist incidents perpetrated by Boston cops mostly against their African-American "brother and sister" cops. Let me say that I may have missed attempts at public education and community discussion organized by white people for white people, and that's my problem. This was, as Pres. Obama stated, "a teachable moment." Anyone who has lived in Boston knows there is going to be a backlash (who knows how many encouraging responses that racist email received?). It saddens me that I received no announcements of public gatherings, group discussions, or requests for meetings to craft a response to Prof. Gates' difficulties. In this teachable moment I have learned once again that black people have to do all the teaching.

So Who's In Control at FEMA?

We are coming into the fourth hurricane season since Hurricane Katrina and the first one of the Obama administration.  I remember the commitment President Obama made to not repeat the mistakes of the previous administration, especially in the area of disaster preparedness and the care for those who have survived natural (and unnatural) disasters.  Then candidate Obama even issued a fact sheet and plan.  You all know I love myself some Pres. Obama but I am deeply frustrated by the actions of FEMA in relationship to the ongoing post Hurricane Katrina housing crisis in the Gulf region.

On Wednesday FEMA announced they were taking all of the trailers back without providing additional housing or addressing the gross and ongoing inadequacies of their response to the needs of Katrina survivors.  

So I wrote our new president.  You should do the same.  I wrote because I am confident he will respond, and because I'm a community organizer.  What can I say? It's automatic.

Here's what I wrote:

Please stop the ongoing stress for Katrina survivors through their displacement from FEMA trailers.  The lack of accountability and control of FEMA is disheartening to those of us who voted for Pres. Obama and unconscionable (that is Bush-like).  

Don't just keep old Bush administration unfulfilled promises, make new ones that meet the needs of a people in desperate straights, and be accountable to the Katrina survivors and their fellow citizens who are concerned about their welfare.

I will be in NOLA next week working at the 7th ward neighborhood house and joining in any protests happening to force our government to speed the recovery of displaced/homeless Katrina survivors rather than continue to hinder it.

Respectfully,

Rebecca Johnson

Crock Pots for Obama and Other Acts of Citizenship

 I have finally stopped dreaming of walking turf, those artfully selected sets of streets, based on voter data, that we door-knocked in Ohio as we sought to identify Obama voters.  Every night after the election, for over a week I was back in Akron, standing on the sidewalks of North Hill, studying my assignment.  Who had absentee ballots? Who was to be persuaded to vote for Obama?  Who to motivate to vote early?  I didn't dream about the scruffy yards or sometimes pitiable houses or even the terriers that resented my presence.  I dreamt about page after page of details ...  and walking.  Pat says this is kinetic memory, the impact of almost fifty hours of door knocking working its way out of my system.  Probably true, but it was also the dissipation of anxiety. 

The narrative of my dreaming back home was the same as the narrative of my waking state in Ohio -- do I have the right address, literature, words to persuade?  Would people listen to me or close the door in my face?  What if white people were angry?  What if black people indifferent? Of course it was Akron, people for the most part are always friendly; and in spite of the endless campaigning to which they had been subjected, they continued to be friendly and amazingly patient with the process.

My personal apprehension had its source in the previous presidential campaign of John Kerry.  I know I have criticized that campaign at length in this space but my disappointment in that effort was never really from a critique of Kerry's political strategy or organization, abysmal as it was. More importantly,  I felt like we had let a dying man down.

One of the last things my father, Virgil Johnson,  asked me to do before his passing in 2004, was to come back to Akron and work to defeat George Bush.  The war and the utter betrayal that the Bush administration represented deeply upset my father.  When Pat and I reported to America Coming Together (ACT) headquarters to do GOTV for John Kerry they were disorganized, yes.  But they also were utterly unrepresentative of the larger community.  I was one of the only people who knew the area.  

I knew the moment we walked into Obama headquarters this past August that this was going to be a different campaign.  Yes, the staff was young but the volunteer coordinator was a local girl.  I recognized people from my old neighborhood at the long phone banking table (the phone bank coordinator, a local guy, would come up to his 20,000th phone call during our stay later in the campaign).

In October, after one day of door-to-door work, I realized I didn't  want to be any place else. The office was awash in activity -- volunteers arriving early morning to get their neighborhood assignments, mid-morning for phone banking, and at noon to deliver food.

Those who could walked turf and those who couldn't walk, cooked.  There was a continuous stream of hot plates, industrial size aluminum tins, and crock pots coming into the office.  This is where my childhood neighbors, the friends of my father and mother (of happy memory), my elderly aunts and uncles, came to do their service.  One of the rewards of walking was the satisfaction of participating effectively in a well run campaign.  Almost as significant was coming back to headquarters, recognizing we had knocked on 200 doors (there was one volunteer who had knocked 100 doors a day for 30 days!) and celebrating with homemade coconut cake or egg custard pie.

My father needed George Bush to lose in 2004.  We didn't manage to deliver that.  He could not have imagined the campaign of 2008 or the feeling of redemption that I feel for our failures in that past effort.  I wish he was here to share one other experience with me.  Citizenship.  

This is the one that is difficult for some outside the African-American community to understand.  I won't pretend that I can explain it now, except in this small way.  All through the Civil Rights years (arguably from the end of Reconstruction to the Voting Rights Act) my people have organized -- against Jim Crow, for access to education, to end racial discrimination in the military, against the Klan, for the right to vote -- to be recognized as full citizens of this country.    Door knocking, mass meetings, meals for hundreds of hungry volunteers, we know how to do that.

This was the first time that I had the sense that it wasn't just us.  Certainly, a minority of white folks always joined us in these struggles. Those efforts were to regain something that had been taken away, or had never really been ours -- full participation in the American system.  Here was this effort that was exactly what my father and his people before him had longed for.  African-Americans were included, but it went beyond us, an effort that resulted in this improbable man, Barack Obama, reclaiming the Office of President for all of us.

That's the pleasure of citizenship. My father, Virgil Johnson, would have enjoyed it very much.

Rollover Minutes for Obama

The first thing that happens when you walk into the Akron Ohio Obama Campaign for Change office, after the warm welcome, is a sit-down where the volunteer coordinator tells you her story.  The personal story seems to be the meta-narrative of the Obama get out the vote training camps.  Everyone has a story of suffering, struggle, commitment and change.  A volunteer might arrive not realizing he or she has that story, but after listening to the extremely committed, calm and cheerful interns, fellows, coordinators, neighborhood captains and senior staff, soon after that first Obama Boot Camp they realized they had a story, one that said, "I am like Obama.  His life is like my life.  His campaign can speak to my suffering."

So the meta-narrative than training in how to make phone calls to undecided voters.  I am so happy I have 3000 roll over minutes for the cause.  Daytime calls are to the alleged unemployed retirees and elderly but hardly anyone is at home.  People hang up on you, occasionally engage in conversation but mostly the volunteer leaves a voicemail message created by the campaign.  

I am willing to use this highly scripted few sentences and do just about anything the young people running this office ask of me.  If the personal story is the meta-narrative, then smart, technology rich organization is the central strategy.  This campaign is organized in ways that John Kerry never imagined possible.  Our calls were to carefully selected voters.  Our canvassing as well.  No wholesale blizzard of literature dropped on every door step multiple times every single day of the last week of the campaign. No frantic efforts to figure out who is going to staff what get-out-the-vote efforts because Labor is angry with the Democratic Party and the Party has irritated everyone who crossed their path.  So these young folks are carrying out an inspiring and effective effort.

The best door-knock of the night was at a house where the Middle Eastern immigrant naturalized citizen father stated, "Oh I am voting, we are all voting, me, my sons, my wife." When asked if he would like to volunteer, he stated, "I am bringing the whole community to the polls with me.  We are voting for Obama."

Now that's worth three hours in Ohio autumn dampness and cold.  

A Different Kind of Storm Brewing

I got a link to Truth Out from a friend in Ireland about a brewing voter atrocity in my home state of Ohio.  Since Marie Mulholland is coming to Akron for ten days to work with Pat and I on get out the vote efforts at the end of October she is rightly curious about the intricacies of America's "right" to vote.  

This is what I told her about Ohio "voter caging": 

Voting in US is a federal right but administered by states and subject to the vagaries of state regulations. Ohio allows these mailings, which don't come from the election office but from opposition party operatives. It allows the opposition to use a part of the state law that allows them to challenge a person's eligibility to vote, or accuse them of voter fraud based on the allegation that they don't live where they stated they lived when they registered to vote. The do not forward order means the official looking "voter notice" may not be sent on to the voter in time for them to change their address, or may be sent to an inaccurate address on purpose.

Ohio is one of the worst states for this kind of shenanigans and why we are all going there at the end of October. Welcome to the US system of voter "rights".

Campaign '08: What Has Faith Got To Do With It?

All of a sudden it is all about faith, all about what faith inspires us to do.  And this is why I am a lousy blogger.  There is too much happening too fast.  I am still ruminating Obama's Super Tuesday Speech but everyone else is two or three scandals, "misstatements" and serious misgivings ahead of me.  

I started thinking about the gospel that Obama alluded to or actually quoted in his Super Tuesday victory speech with the intention of writing about it immediately but I needed to know more about him, his community organizing experience, what he believed.  Then there was the Jeremiah Wright problem.  Hmmm.  I got to hear James Cohn for the first time in years.  Reverend James Cohn, the author of a Black Theology of Liberation.  Then there was the "bitterness" comment.  And today there was Jeremiah Wright, at the National Press Club, with the revelation that the Black Church is different from the White Church, even if the Prosperity Gospel crowd would like to deny it.

I found myself wishing I knew if Obama agreed with his former pastor.  Because I agree with much of what Rev. Wright said today.  I occasionally return to Rev. Cohn's work, even though I am no longer a practicing Christian.  Because a liberatory Christ makes Christianity conceivable.  Because as a practicing Buddhist in a tradition that was transmitted West primarily by privileged White people, I still experience some Insight Meditation settings as a throw back to that Sunday experience of the most segregated hour -- and I am on the wrong cushion, in the wrong hall, because I am the wrong color.

So I will finally write about the Super Tuesday speech because it alludes to much that should give us hope for at least radical thought informing Obama's campaign, if not actual radical speech or action.  I will write about it, but not tonight.  There's a bit more to think about first.