A Tale of Two Ground Games

I volunteered this weekend and today out of one of 20 decentralized Durham for Obama hubs -- Faulkner Fox's house. Faulkner was one of the very first organizers during the primary. You walk into her house and it's packed: kids playing, a room with people making phone calls, a data entry room, giant maps of the city and an endless stream of people like me picking up canvassing packets with a list of registered voters, flyers, voting location information, etc.. You take your packet, you walk a neighborhood, you bring back the information which goes to data entry, where its generated into a new walk and call sheets the next day. There are snacks, sunlight, piles of stickers and a lots of noise and gentle chaos.

My new friend Kelly, a journalist, wanted to go check out the Durham McCain headquarters.

Now, in fairness, Durham is heavily Democrat. For example, there are lots of local political offices where Dems run unopposed (which bugs me). The GOP here is weak. But still......

• The office is hidden in a strip mall behind a Chiles and a car dealership.
  
• It's full of hundreds and hundreds of signs and stickers and buttons, at 7pm the night before the election, but ....no people. I asked how on earth they were going to get all the signs distributed in time and he explained that they can't have signs anywhere overnight. That vandals steal them and they can only go out in the morning (does this make them vampire signs?) He then told a story, a "hilarious" story, about a guy he knew actually shot over the head of someone trying to steal his sign. I sucked in the giant "OMG!!!!" sound I wanted to make in the interest of journalist objectivity
  
• The people there are extremely nice. (of course, it's NC) But all male, all white, all over 55. I saw two women both wearing just an insane amount of make up. What's up with GOP women overusing foundation and eyeliner?
  
• There are no snacks that I could see, but all sorts of flyers about socialism and posters about supporting the troops
  
• Volunteer opportunities available included: handing out flyers at the polls or making calls, but there was no canvassing, no voter outreach
• The man in charge we talked to said the main concern was that the Dems were just "rounding up the mentally handicapped -- that's the politically correct term if you know what I mean -- and bussing them in. Same with people in nursing homes. We're just trying to challenge this stuff at the polls."
• One of the only volunteers I saw there asked how early he could come since this morning "the security guard wouldn't let him in." I asked if the security guard was for the whole strip mall or special. The GOP has hired a security guard for every McSame office in the country. Wha????? What an incredible waste of resources!
  

So basically, in Durham, the Dem ground game is constantly get more people involved in the process ( in Faulkner's house you see equal numbers of blacks, whites, browns and beiges, old, young, women, men, folks with disabilities, moms with kids....the whole enchilada) and go door to door encouraging everyone to vote. The GOP ground game is try to control the process, argue that the wrong sort of people are voting and challenge their right. They have no literature or argument for why you should vote for McCain. Just lots of "He's SEeKrIt mUsLim" crap and some support the troops posters.

Can you imagine voting and some GOP jerk saying "excuse me, but she seems retarded to me, I challenge this..."

oy vey. I hope all the lawyers I know (and I know way too many lawyers) are all out there doing voter protection tomorrow......