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Volunteer Power in PennsylvaniaEditors note: This article first appeared in the Berkshire Eagle, the primo newspaper of western Massachusetts, in mid-November. Journalist and author Dick Lipez is a longtime LGB RPCV member and contributor to our newsletter. GOTV, I now know, is not a new cable channel, but means Get Out The Vote. It’s one of the many political-campaign terms my partner, Joe Wheaton, and I learned - along with “chum” (buttons and bumper stickers), “turf-cutting” (preparing maps and voter lists for canvassers), and “flushing” (voters out of their houses on “E-day”) - during a month with the Kerry campaign in Pennsylvania. Joe and I were “Kerry Travelers,” supporters from safe states (Massachusetts in our case) volunteering in swing states for a day, a week, or, in our case, October 1 right through the heartbreaking election. This phenomenon - hundreds of thousands across the country did it - had the breadth and intensity of a major social movement. The Kerry volunteer tsunami built on what Howard Dean began, and it worked in tandem with the millions of people who revolutionized political organizing in the United States with MoveOn.Org and Americans Coming Together. Dozens of Berkshire (Western Massachusetts) Democrats traveled to nearby New Hampshire to knock on doors in September and October. Joe and I picked Pennsylvania because I grew up there and because, with 21 electoral votes, the state was crucial to a Kerry win. We were sent to Bucks County, a largely moderate-Republican suburban Philadelphia county of 600,000 people that Al Gore barely won in 2000 and Kerry-Edwards needed to hold in 2004 to augment strong support in the city itself and make up for big Bush margins upstate. (James Carville once described Pennsylvania as “Philadelphia over here, Pittsburgh over there, and Alabama in between.”) What was both shocking and satisfying for Joe and me was how shorthanded the paid campaign staff was and our rapid elevation to staff jobs we feared were way above our levels of competence, but weren’t quite. Joe was office manager and coordinator of volunteers, and I was coordinator of canvassing in upper Bucks County. During the final GOTV drive, Joe segued into being site manager for one of the five GOTV staging areas–this meant overseeing a mobile army of volunteers knocking on the door of every identified Kerry supporter four times on E-day - and I, a writer, became transportation coordinator. (As a boy in Lock Haven, PA, I dreamed of becoming a Pennsylvania Railroad dispatcher; now I understand why I’m a writer instead.) Joe and I were in over our heads, but so was just about every one of the six other staff and 1,500-plus volunteers in Bucks County. What kept us going and, in the end, made it all work (Kerry won Bucks County by two percentage points, carried the state by three) was the shared passionate conviction by many hundreds of volunteers that we were together in a mighty crusade to save our country from blunderers and bigots and greedy cynics, and we simply had to make this campaign succeed. So. Need walk lists, maps and “lit” for four out-of-state busloads and scores of local individuals arriving to knock on 10,000 doors on the weekend? Volunteers frantically pitch in and it gets done. Need breakfast and lunch arranged overnight for 300 volunteers scheduled to show up Saturday morning for GOTV training at the Levittown headquarters? I say, “Joe, I think you need to step into this meeting.” “Why?” “Something has been overlooked.” Need GOTV canvassers on E-day to redeploy and carry snacks, drinks and “comfort” to after-work voters waiting two and three hours in poll lines? Cell phones ablaze, the volunteers leap into action. At this level of a political campaign, there’s not much discussion of Kerry versus Bush social or foreign policy. It’s all get-through-the-next-ten-minutes without having events “spin out of control,” in the words of Dave Bailey, one of the early Dean organizers who later joined the Kerry staff. “If things spin out of control, what will it look like?” I once asked Bailey. He said, “You’ll recognize it.” Joe Trippi, the great Dean-campaign guru, stopped by one day amidst the bedlam to wish us well, and we paused long enough to be thrilled. We lost the election - and now must regroup for the 2006 midterms - but Joe and I left Pennsylvania buoyed by the knowledge that 48 percent of the national electorate has W’s number, and by a renewed appreciation for the power of volunteerism. Back in the ‘60s, when I worked as a Peace Corps program evaluator, we sometimes informally used the term “super volunteers.” It referred to Peace Corps volunteers who were so intelligent, adaptable, good-humored, innovative, unflappable and determined to improve bad situations that, no matter how rough the social conditions, no matter how bad the Peace Corps’ training and programming might sometimes be, these people just went ahead and figured things out and made them work.
On the Kerry campaign, Joe and I met literally hundreds of super volunteers,
all in one place, working for the same great patriotic cause. This must have
been repeated thousands of times over across the United States, and it adds
up to millions of fiercely committed believers in social and economic justice
at home and sanity in relating to the rest of the world. With a force like
this that’s not about to go away - all we need now is a shape and a few
good leaders - George W. Bush’s power to do harm is diminished. And while
he may be too arrogant to know it, W’s days are already numbered.
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