Canvassing

Yesterday my sister and I canvassed in a neighborhood near here for Obama-Biden. It was hard, but we did it.

When we first showed up to the headquarters, where walls were covered in cute sayings on plaques (e.g., "Keep calm and carry on" over the toilet) and with a pool table in the center and a bar to the side facing away from the bay window, the organizer looked at me with serious concern. She doubted I could walk around ringing doorbells with my cane.

"I can walk a mile," I told her, and my sister vouched for me. "She walked all around Paris last year!'

So the organizers gave us the instructions and turned us loose, and we knocked on twenty to forty doors and talked to potential voters; and at the end we felt very tired. Now, at home, I can see them behind my eyes: the doors, the yards with flowers in them, the people on their front porches.

The ones we found home agreed that this is an important election. So did a youngish Republican who was playing with his dog in a park across the street from where we canvassed.

"I think women belong in the kitchen!" he yelled at us.

My 67-year-old sister shouted back, "And I want big government out of my vagina!" 

In the end, we came back to HQ with perhaps twenty commitments to vote. This is the ground operation. Not much, but what we can do.

I never would have signed up for something so strenuous when the campaign was going well.
Now the campaign is not going so well, and I'm sending more money and resolved to oppose these devourers of widows' houses who want to be put back in charge of the country. My emotion is worked up. I feel like crying when I think Obama could lose.

It will break my heart if Obamacare is repealed.

2012 Election Vocab

Follow the news?

Then you'll be familiar with these terms:

"Double down," even "triple down." (Nothing to do w/ football--I don't think anyway) = say it again, stronger (usually used to refer to compounding a mistake or a gaffe).

"Dog whistle" -- Communicating to ultra right-wing that we are just as racist and misogynist as you like, while hiding the communication so non ultra-right can not hear it.

"Game-changer, -changing," or just "-change" = What Romney campaign keeps predicting and looking for, to make up for declining poll numbers from voters realizing what a billionaire plutocrat, non tax return releasing offshore tax evading money hider he is.

"47 percent" = The number of Americans Mitt Romney thinks won't vote for him because they're thinking of themselves as "victims" who think they are "entitled to things like food and medical care...."

"1 percent" = The richest among us, who are looking for a different kind of handout: more tax breaks for billionaires.

"War on women" = efforts to make religious beliefs against women's rights a matter of law.  (Co-exists in dog whistler's brain with the notion of needing "smaller government"--yes, small enough to invade a woman's vaginas!!)  Revealed by such fantastical terms as

"Legitimate rape" = a revealing gaffe by a Republican Senate candidate, who articulated an urban legend that a woman's body has "ways of shutting that whole thing down," i.e., will not become pregnant, if she is forced to have sex against her will. (Meaning that if a pregnancy results, the rape could not have been "legitimate.")

"Ten thousand dollars" -- The spontaneity of Mitt Romney on display when he carelessly offered to bet that amount during a Republican primary debate. Another example is "a couple of Cadillacs" (which wife Ann drives).

"Strap to roof" = something Romney did to his dog on a long car trip, which he "doubled down" on when he claimed the dog loved it--to the glee of columnists and cartoonists.

[An old one resurrected] "Where's the beef?" having to do with":

"Get specific" or, "give specifics" = complaints by media that neither candidate has revealed enough details of HOW they want to reduce unemployment and so forth.

[An old one in the process of being retired but you still hear it occasionally] "Class war," having to do with the above 47%
and also [remember this one?] 99% being mean to the 1% the alleged "job creators" who work so hard and are so deserving.

"Don't have time..." [to get specific] = A Ryan VP gaffe on Fox News when the interviewer kept pressing for him to "get specific" on his budget plan.

"Voter fraud" = excuse for Republican-majority states to try to suppress Democratic-leaning voters through

"Voter ID Laws"  to combat imaginary fraud on the part of Democrats.

"Voter fraud" may be retiring along now that the news knows that Republican voter registration have commited

Actual fraud = another term for the Republican nominee.