lumrant
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
All The President's Kids (I hope)
By god, there's still time to salvage the month of August with a post! Phew. The archive will not reveal the depths of my abandonment of this blog just yet...
So, here's a stream-of-consciousness sort of rant about the last few weeks. The campaign thing has definitely been in high gear, and I'm finding the local democratic scene to be full of ineffective planning and halfass operations. No surpise, says Jeanie, who assures me that all not-for-profit type groups are exactly like this. Not to be deterred, I have been trying to exert my will on my colleagues, and I have had some success, although I have to respect their savvy and experience; those factors pretty much trump my anal-retentiveness when it comes to real-world campaigning. I have managed to rise to the level of Group Leader within a pretty large House District here in Tampa, which is cool. I had an excellent precinct walk over the weekend for which I got 12 people to turn out (not too shabby, they say), and we visited around 300 households.
The big news here is that I got to spend the day running around with the Kerry and Edwards kids--specifically, Cate Edwards, Alex Kerry, Vanessa Kerry, and Andre Heinz. They are all doing an East coast barnstorm of various universities, appearing in front of a couple hundred kids at each stop, delivering their little issue monologues, and having nice little Q&A sessions with the undergrads. See the pictures part of my site for some exciting action shots.
A few thoughts:
- These people are pretty damned down-to-earth, with the possible exception of Andre Heinz. But maybe I'm just poking fun at him because he's rich and handsome! Neither their luggage nor their clothes nor anything else really stood out at ridiculously wealthy, and they all showed some pretty honest emotions when confronted with various questions by the college kids they were speaking to.
- I have much sympathy for all of them. Basically, their lives have stopped until this campaign is over. And, while I too have been working pretty long hours for no money lately, I don't have to put up with the exact same barrage of questions, photo requests, and general zoo-like conditions that these guys live with right now. On the plus side (perhaps), at least nobody is going overboard with ridiculous security. There were no Secret Service folks associated with this campus tour by the Kerry Kids, as near as I could tell.
- An aside: today in the Tampa campaign office, I met a young, lanky Texan who turned out to be Lloyd Bentsen. That's right, grandson of Lloyd "You're No Jack Kennedy" Bentsen! He is doing advance team work for Edwards at the moment: a trip to Tampa this weekend was being planned as of this morning, but it ended up being cancelled thanks to the hurricane that ravaged the Carolinas.
- One good thing that happened for me today is that I got a good shot in the arm about how unfair, inaccurate, and hurtful all the Republican attacks on Kerry's military record are. One of the audience members at the University of Central Florida inquired about how they could respond to friends parroting the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth propaganda, and Vanessa Kerry damn near fell off of her stool with rage! It was quite apparent that they are offended by that whole attack for much more than political reasons, and it pumped me up a little bit when I heard Vanessa talking about how John Kerry's whole life is built around honesty. I feel like I can relate to the guy on that one, and I'm going to try to keep some of that rage inside myself as we go further into the campaign.
That is all for now!
