history and canvassing

So I went up to Rhode Island and had a fantastic time canvassing. The other volunteers were all smart, motivated, nice people. They were nice enough to listen to me spout off on all of my political views. With a growing political interest I find myself becoming somewhat cynical, the more you learn about politics, the uglier the game appears. I am reminded of what a friend told me, that it is much easier to be a cynic than to find solutions. While I would not be so arrogant as to believe that I personally could come up with any meaningful solutions, I do feel that in participating in the Barack Obama campaign I am part of a solution.

I went canvassing for most of the day, and like any canvasser knows, must of the time people weren’t home and I just left fliers. I did meet one Obama supporter who said she liked him but that she was reticent about voting for him in the primary because she had heard he refuses to say the pledge of allegiance because he cant say the word “god.” I was shocked, not at the rumor, which is a small part of a vast media misinformation campaign that stretches back to the 60’s, but that a supporter of Obama would have just taken this at face value, that they would not have tried to investigate this claim. Any digging would show that Obama is in fact a Christian and not only will he say the word “god” but that also he actually has a profound personal faith.


I didn’t correct the woman, because I was only a volunteer and not an official spokesman for Obama, but I did urge her to do some research on her own and be careful of any outrageous comments like that, not just directed at Obama, but at HRC or even at McCain. I also helped another person who wanted to vote but didn’t know where her voting precinct was located.
I think that talking is the lifeblood of democracy, and I didn’t get to do much of it in my door-to-door activities. When I encountered HRC supporters, every last one of them was negative about Obama. They ranged from dismissive to outright hostile, but none of them were at all interested in why I was interested in Obama. Maybe it is presumptuous of me to expect people to engage in a dialogue. We should talk about why we can’t talk.


I don’t expect people to talk to me when I walk down the street, and I’m pretty sure they don’t feel that much different. This “fear of the other” stretches to politics. The conversations between supporters of various candidates are hardly ever constructive. I’m not an expert in constitutional law and I don’t know as much as I would like about the founding fathers, but I feel like meaningful political conversation was central to their creation of our new political system.


In my understanding of their views, they resented the fact that Britain didn’t respect them, that they couldn’t meaningfully have a political conversation with the motherland. England would listen to them when it was economically advantageous to her, but when the colonists chafed at the intolerable acts, which essentially prevented foreign trade, things started getting out of hand. Granted this is a glib interpretation of a much more complicated issue, but it is sill germane to our argument. Democracies are built with the idea that people with different views can get along peacefully and use their different perspectives to make a better world. A monarchy is where everyone thinks the same way, and the modern world decided that elevating the nobility and the king to godlike status wasn’t okay. The French had a revolution, the British parliament shifted its power slowly to the House of Commons, and other western European countries cast off the yolk of authoritarian regimes in other ways. I see us having an authoritarian democracy, where dissent is seen as unpatriotic and anti-American. Nonsense, dissent is the quintessential American act.


Based on my experiences, and the way I myself think, political dissent from one’s own views is not looked upon as a valuable contribution to political discourse. HRC people don’t like McCain people or Obama people, and the same can be said about McCain people. I am sure that some Obama people (myself for one) don’t like HRC and McCain, but that is not Obama’s message, he want to start talking with each other earnestly. In his books he talks about how sociable and interesting politicians are in person. I haven’t read all of what democrats write, but I don’t think there are many who would publicly say that Trent Lott tells a good story. Maybe Obama can’t legitimize dissent, but he’s trying to, and none of the other candidates can say that. If the founding fathers could get over the idea of a black man running for president, I posit that they would endorse him, because he has the best shot of bringing America back to the fantastic ideas of our founding fathers. Lets try out this democracy idea of theirs, in my humble opinion its got a lot of potential