Down Home Missourah

We finally made it to St. Joseph yesterday morning and we were put straight to work doing data entry and making phone calls. The office here gives the first impression of being highly disorganized, but actually runs a lot more smoothly than one would expect. There is one other deputy field organizer here from California and two more from New York. Every afternoon a bunch of teenagers show up to make phone calls and canvass the streets and other volunteers show up with lots of food for us. Hard to beat the free food!

If I learn nothing else on this trip, I will take with me the reminder that I need to throw my assumptions about people out the window. Today I spoke to a man with no teeth, who was old and wizened, who wanted bumper stickers and yard signs for himself, his brother, and his "old mother". He was followed a while later by a man wearing a large cross around his neck and a dark button down shirt. At first glance I thought he was a priest, but instead he is a retired school teacher. He talked about having to hide his Democratic leanings through his teaching years because he was worried about what the parents and his fellow teachers would do. He related a story about how when he was growing up he thought that the Republican party was called the "Damn Republicans" as he never heard his father refer to them as anything else.

The volunteers here range in age from high school students to the elderly and I have seen whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians wandering in, helping out, and reporting their excitement about Obama. It has been repeated time and again that this is an historic election and everyone here seems to really feel it. The table full of old ladies behind us at lunch yesterday were discussing Palin and McCain. Everywhere you go, people are talking about it, debating the pluses and minuses of each candidate, and seem to be highly involved. I'm sure that there are those who are ignoring the whole thing and hoping it will blow over, but I have seen more passion and excitement about this election than any I have seen before.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that Obama wins this election and that the Republicans can dial back their horrible rhetoric that is inciting people to shout "terrorist!" and "kill!" when Obama's name is mentioned. These stories are leaking out from the campaign trail and I hope that the main stream media picks up on it and reports it, though they too have come under fire in the past few days. Apparently Sarah Palin is upset at how she came across in the Couric interviews and is holding the nasty MSM responsible for it. The result of her hate mongering was seen today:

From the Washington Post:
Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

VOTE FOR CHANGE!