Before the Election

Just a few comments, more in the nature of personal, even psychological reflections on the campaign than on politics, per se. You know who I'm voting for anyway.

Some time in the past year, maybe when Obama won the Wisconsin primary, I said--and maybe even wrote in the blog--that I hoped I'd live long enough to see the election. And I have, which is kind of amazing, whoever wins.

But I realized this past week that I'm not likely to see the way the next administration actually unfolds over four years. I was watching an episode from the first season of "The West Wing" when it hit me that I was using this TV fiction as a kind of stand-in for my hopes for an Obama presidency. I never saw any of the series before this year, and I've been following it, very slowly, on Netflix, over many months. The episode that knocked me for a loop was the one in which the Bartlet people put a Hispanic jurist on the Supreme Court. To my total amazement, I burst into tears when the Senate confirmation vote hit 51. Yes, it's a well-scripted and even emotionally manipulative scene. But still, it's only television. And then I understood that it was exactly the sort of thing that I hoped would happen if Obama were elected--but that even if he became president, I might not be around to see his first Supreme Court appointment.

The whole incident made me feel silly and more than a little gullible, as well as rueful and sad. And then, a couple of days later, the New York Times ran an article talking about how much "The West Wing" seemed to predict the future. (That is, today's present.) They were referring especially to the last two seasons--6 and 7, I think--which aren't even on my Netflix queue yet. But it did make me feel better about conflating President Bartlet with the possibility of a President Obama.

Because of my limited energy and my lack of voice, my campaign volunteering has been restricted to data entry. But I enjoy doing that, and for the past couple of weeks I've been going in to the nearest office, which was (until Friday evening) Madison campaign headquarters, every day or two for an hour or two. The real benefit has been watching (and listening to) the high school volunteers, whose enthusiasm is boundless. It reminded me that in 1960, when I was 16, I was a Kennedy Girl. All I remember of this is wearing a white plastic boater with a red, white, and blue ribbon on it and carrying a sign to a rally when Kennedy campaigned in Pittsburgh. Maybe I did more, though the Kennedy campaign certainly wasn't so organized as the Obama operation. But even if it was just the rally, that bit of participation in politics certainly affected me and helped make me a politically involved adult. One of the biggest reasons I initially supported Obama was that I saw how much he excited young people--and I really believe that augers well for the future of our democracy. At least some of the kids I saw at the Obama office using Facebook to recruit their musician friends to entertain voters standing in line at the polls are going to be doing political work for decades to come.

I had a less satisfactory experience with the campaign on Saturday. I'd set aside much of the weekend, Monday, and Tuesday to volunteer in whatever capacity I could. Saturday morning I went to a training for poll watchers--I'll be doing that from 12-4 tomorrow. Then I stopped at the local office where I'd been doing data entry to see how I might help. The office has been transformed from city campaign headquarters to a neighborhood staging area for the four-day Get Out the Vote effort. I knew that, but talked to the man in charge and explained that I couldn't canvass or phone bank, but was free to do anything else. He informed me that there wasn't anything else happening at that office and added, "I can't just invent something for you to do."

I have to say that I was crushed. I was already feeling bad that, because of my energy level and my evening schedule (orchestra rehearsal) tomorrow, I couldn't sign up for more than one shift of poll watching, and because of my voice I couldn't be one of the people at the polls reporting back by cell phone to some central location on who had voted. And now I was being told that even though I'd set aside three days to volunteer on the campaign, I was useless if I couldn't canvass or make phone calls.

Thinking about it later, I understood several things. First, the campaign needs what it needs; it runs on the physical energies of its volunteers; and it can't be making special cases for every volunteer with disabilities. (I ran into this several weeks ago when I got myself deputized as a registrar of voters, thinking I could sit at a table somewhere, and then discovered that the campaign wanted its registrars to go out and canvass so they could register anyone they came across who wasn't registered.) Second, this is really the first time that I have been forced to recognize what I can't do, with no opportunity to substitute something that I can do. I can't begin to express how diminished--useless, really--it made me feel and how much it made me understand how the "normal" world is set up to disregard, disrespect, ignore--you fill in the verb--people who aren't "normal," who in any way can't fit in. I think it's very ironic that I learned this lesson trying to help out a campaign that is in many ways the most diverse we've ever had. But maybe it's just an indication of how far we have yet to go. I think of people who live their whole lives in wheelchairs--or are profoundly deaf, or blind. We don't make it easy for them to maintain their self-respect.

Well, I've dug myself out of the little depressed hole that this experience created on Saturday. A surprise visit from my friend Beverly, who was walking past my house Saturday afternoon helped a lot. And so has filling the rest of the weekend with productive tasks, even though they have nothing to do with the campaign. Tomorrow, I'll be a poll watcher. And I'll vote!

Be sure you vote, too!