Signed, sealed, delivered 0 comments

I just got up from an eleven hour nap. Tuesday (and into Wednesday morning) was I think the greatest night of my life. I've got hundreds of stories and hundreds if not thousands of pictures, and I'll try to make another post to this blog after I get home, but most will just have to be shared in person. Right now I need to pack up, drive to the airport where the Obama supporter who shared his home with me this week wants me to fly his plane around, and then hit the road.

Thank you to everyone who visited this site and left comments, e-mails, texts, and voicemails of support. Thank you also to everyone who supported this campaign over the last two years. A lot of damage has been done in the last eight years, but if anyone can lead us out its our President-elect, Barack Obama. God, that sounds good.

Ready 2 comments

South Dade Business Center, Miami, Florida, 4:28 a.m.:
In a few minutes, our team is going to start walking into this office. At 6:00, they'll be heading out to our four different staging locations across our territory. At 6:30, we are each going to be standing in front of volunteer poll watchers, training them, and exhorting them to give it their all today. At 7:00, those poll watchers will be arriving at their precincts while the first canvass volunteers arrive and get their walk lists and pep talks from us. As the morning wears on, we're going to be checking off their canvasses, house by house, and reporting numbers to headquarters. The pollwatchers will be reporting turnout, and we'll be moving our canvassers around Randolph Heights, Perrine, Fairway Heights, Howard, and all our other neighborhoods to shore up any weak spots they detect. By 3pm, we'll have shifted to blanket canvassing, with our volunteers running through every street and tagging every door we see. By 5pm, even the out-of-state volunteers and the Obama for America staffers will have left their posts and poured into the neighborhoods in search of that one determinitive vote. When the polls close, there will be hours of work yet to do. The canvassers will move to the precincts, adding precious manpower to help keep voters in line. As the lines gradually wind down, and precincts close for the night, their poll watchers will shift to the remaining precincts until finally, the last voter has voted.

I was tallying one of the six thousand volunteer calls we turned out of our little storage locker in the South Dade Business Center yesterday, and I saw a note written by the line for a 96-year old female voter. It said "Already voted. Too ill to volunteer in office, but making calls from home." A lot of people have shed a lot of blood, and a lot of sweat, and a lot of tears to bring us some few hours from electing Barack Obama the 44th president of the United States of America. In the words of the midnight regional conference call, let's go win this fucking thing.

Early Voting 1 comments

Sunday was the last day of two weeks of early voting in Florida. Polls closed at 5, but everyone in line at 5 was entitled to vote. Around 8, I went out to the line with water, and someone else from our office brought pizza. We handed them out (only behind the "no campaigning within 100 feet of the doors" line) to McCain and Obama supporters alike, but we made sure that everyone knew where the goods had come from.

It took about seven hours for voters to get through the line, but to their credit they seemed to all stick it out for the duration. I overheard one African-American woman say as she was walking to her car "I feel like I was just in a civil rights march!" I also met a gentleman who told me the story of how he helped a friend outfit a plane to deal cocaine, was caught and arrested but found not guilty by a jury, and then battled the Florida Bar all the way to the Florida Supreme Court for admission. See Florida Bd. Bar Examiners re D.M.J., 586 So.2d 1049 (Fla., 1991) (holding that some guy who talked to me outside an early voting location should be admitted to the bar).

Here is a poor attempt to capture an image of the hundreds of people lined up outside the precinct three hours after the polls closed last night:

And here are two darling kids who were explaining to anyone who would listen why they were supporting Barack Obama:

I have no idea where in time or space I am 0 comments

Thirty minutes ago, I was on the phone coordinating rides for voters who cannot get to the polls on their own. I said "Hi, this is Scott in... uh... whichever Obama office it is that I am in." The dispatcher responded "Don't worry, I've lost track of where I am too."

Fifteen minutes ago, someone asked what time it was, and a big argument ensued. It took several moments before we figured out that Daylight Savings Time had come and gone without us noticing.
This is our office, in full-swing around 10pm last night.
This is a bird (crane/stork/heron/some crazy tropical bird I wouldn't see back home) in someone's front lawn while I was canvassing Friday.
Two days...

How freaking cool is this? 0 comments



At the Obama office with Lt. Col. Eldridge Williams of the Tuskeegee Airmen. That's one Army Air Corps/Air Force lieutenant colonel on board; whatdya say we make it two, Dad?

Ten offices 1 comments

Here's our office this morning, at 10:35 a.m.:



There are fifteen of us, hard at work, and we've already dispatched ten canvassers on the day. Better still, this is just one of TEN (not "a few" as I said yesterday) Obama offices in Miami alone. The organization on the ground is just phenomenal.

Here's my data entry group this morning:

The guy in green in the middle is from Kennesaw, so we're repping the Peach State down here. One day I want to be cool enough to pull off a hat like that.

Anyway, I'm doing more data entry, then canvassing during the day. My suggestion was to all put John McCain masks on, then go around knocking on doors shouting "four more years!" tonight. Put a real scare into folks on Halloween. I'm not sure the field organizer is buying it...

Miami 2 comments

Here are a couple pictures from last night in Kissimmee. The conditions for photography were less than ideal, but hopefully you'll get the idea:





So, after four hours of sleep, I drove on to the Miami office:

You can't tell from the picture, but there have been 10 or 12 phone bankers going at all hours since I arrived (and this is just one of several offices the campaign has in Miami alone!) I spent the day doing two canvassing shifts, and as soon as I hit post I'm going to start in on some data entry. I'm having a lot of fun so far, and I haven't even gone to find my first Miami Cuban sandwich yet!

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