...
For a variety of reasons, I've strayed off track. Might take another couple of weeks to make it back. Please, patience, i know the wait will be stressful for you.
posted by Greg Bloom at 6/25/2005 05:54:00 PM
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Broke Summer
Parentals in town this weekend, and i had no time to write. Plus it is HOT too hot to do anything but bake.
I did accomplish two things of note in regards to BB.
1) A new tentative subtitle. Please see above and react, then analyze your reaction, write it down and email it to me. Also i will need a urine sample.
2) I read this brutally on-point post in Mickey Kaus's blog. He's been basically one of the definitive voices, along with John Stewart and Matt Bai, that has crystallized or just created (IMO) the best in commentary and thought about the election etc.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2120319/&#blameej
I will quote this post at length for a bit right here. Kaus is eviscerating Dem wag EJ Dionne for the 'coccooning' that trapped the left in the election and threatens to continue to trap it. Dionne has since taken the line (although I have yet to read Dionne directly) we shouldn't just criticize Kerry and thereby risk ignoring the real problems. Responds Kaus:
"even if Kerry is history, a Quayle-like dead man walking, the conditions that led Democrats to delude themselves into thinking he was a plausible candidate are still in place and still a problem."
He quotes Donne's coverage of the election w/ flagged commentary as follows:
I did accomplish two things of note in regards to BB.
1) A new tentative subtitle. Please see above and react, then analyze your reaction, write it down and email it to me. Also i will need a urine sample.
2) I read this brutally on-point post in Mickey Kaus's blog. He's been basically one of the definitive voices, along with John Stewart and Matt Bai, that has crystallized or just created (IMO) the best in commentary and thought about the election etc.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2120319/&#blameej
I will quote this post at length for a bit right here. Kaus is eviscerating Dem wag EJ Dionne for the 'coccooning' that trapped the left in the election and threatens to continue to trap it. Dionne has since taken the line (although I have yet to read Dionne directly) we shouldn't just criticize Kerry and thereby risk ignoring the real problems. Responds Kaus:
"even if Kerry is history, a Quayle-like dead man walking, the conditions that led Democrats to delude themselves into thinking he was a plausible candidate are still in place and still a problem."
He quotes Donne's coverage of the election w/ flagged commentary as follows:
"Mid-Campaign--Wishful Thinking: "Here is the biggest surprise of the 2004 election so far: It is John Kerry who is eager to talk about terrorism and national security, and President Bush's campaign that is trying to quash a far-reaching debate on these issues." -- April 20, 2004
"The conventional wisdom on this presidential election is wrong. It's frequently said that John Kerry is the man in trouble. Yes, Kerry does have a gift for getting in his own way. But President Bush is the candidate with big problems. ... [O]n the current numbers, Kerry will win if he's simply good enough. Bush's task is harder: to seem a whole lot better than he does now to voters who already know him well."-- May 14, 2004
Pre-Convention--Utter Delusion:
"First Ripple of a Political Tidal Wave?
Rep. Jay Inslee knows about political tidal waves, because one of them almost sank his political career.
Inslee, who now represents a suburban Seattle district, was tossed out of Congress from another district in the 1994 Republican sweep. ...But he came back to the House in 1998, and now what he's seeing 'is the same tidal wave moving in the opposite direction. . . . There's a passion out there.' And the passion, Inslee says, is running against George W. Bush. ...
Even if the plural of anecdote is not data, the anecdotes are about citizens who avoided politics for years but are now devoting time to John Kerry's campaign out of hostility to Bush. Individuals who never before made a campaign contribution are opening their checkbooks to Kerry and the Democrats. ... And, perhaps most significant, moderate and moderately conservative Republicans are showing little enthusiasm for Bush, reflecting their worries about his Iraq policy and their qualms over large deficits." -- June 29, 2004
October--Looking for Friendly Faces in the Crowd: "In the torrent of polling information released over the weekend, the most significant finding was this one: John Kerry's supporters are more likely than George W. Bush's to believe that this year's election is the most important of their lifetimes." -- Oct. 26, 2004"
posted by Greg Bloom at 6/12/2005 11:20:00 PM
Hi there. If you're new, the best way to read all this is to go the the very bottom post on the page and work your way up from there through the posts. Bottom post to top.
**5/1: If anyone out there is trying to keep count, this is now in the Chapter 4 region, depending. The gist so far: Boy wants to save world, boy signs on as a foot soldier, boy learns the ropes of the army. Boy hits the trenches. Manhood may or may not ensue.**
**5/1: If anyone out there is trying to keep count, this is now in the Chapter 4 region, depending. The gist so far: Boy wants to save world, boy signs on as a foot soldier, boy learns the ropes of the army. Boy hits the trenches. Manhood may or may not ensue.**
posted by Greg Bloom at 6/12/2005 10:40:00 PM
Sunday, June 05, 2005
It should go without saying that the order of all this is going to change drastically. But there, i said it anyway.
You do develop a sense with people. You can see from about ten feet back whether they have reserved a space in their busy or bereft lives for some modicum of political consciousness; in most, you see only a blankness, in the eyes and in the jaw. You are of no more consequence to them than a deoderant commercial – even less, since you’re not hawking anything real. You are noise, momentarily amplified and given form outside of headlines and talking heads, of a world that doesn’t speak to them and doesn’t make sense if they should happen to hear it.
But his by no means makes it ok to not call them, even if you think you’re sure they won’t respond. You really never know when an exception will walk by, and anyway, it is both politically correct and zen to make your cast without interruptions, hesitation or discrimination. The smart canvasser plays this to his advantage – she finds pockets of untapped sources, people who didn’t expect to be approached themselves, who are startled by the very question Do you want to help beat George Bush and who cross over from the faceless stream into the realm of political participation in the very instant that the canvasser raps them.
Nevertheless: the majority of the people out here don’t want to speak to you. The majority, of course, is not your concern.
All it takes is a handful of people out of the hundreds who will walk by you in a day; your job is to connect with them when the time comes. Some of them you will catch at the right moment, for whatever reason they will give you $100 straight off – they’d been meaning to do it, they just got paid, they just saw Farenheight 9/11 again, or they just got off the phone with their granmother or some shit like that. Even beginners snag them; that’s what makes the operation work for almost anyone. But a good canvasser does something more.
* * *
Canvassing is a skill, there is no doubt about that. There are techniques, Some people surprise themselves when they find out that they are able to get people to give them money; many others don’t make it through a full day. But even though the fundamental requirement is that you feel comfortable talking to strangers, there is also a defined set of tools with which you can equip yourself. Of course, nobody wants to talk to anyone else on the street. A walk down the street is for many people a private act – they might be looking around them, but they don’t care to be looked at, much less approached. They also don’t expect you. When you greet them, it is going to catch them a little off guard, and as a result, their response is going to be very similar each time. As a canvasser, you grow used to hearing the very same small set of responses from everyone; through training and experience, the canvassers acquires a matching set of rejoinders. A breakdown:
“I don’t have time.”
This will only take a few minutes, and it’s really important.
(Except for people who are actually late to an appointment, everyone has time. This is a weak front, easily penetrated.)
“I don’t have any money on me.”
Well let me tell you what we’re doing.
(Snag yourself some wiggle room. Almost everyone carries some kind of currency on them – this statement could very well be true they were to say it to a bum, as in “I don’t have any change on me,” but they probably aren’t wandering about without $. Still, you can’t quite blurt out “We take credit cards and checks!” Gotta get them to stop first.)
“I’m already registered.”
That’s great, but we’re not out here to register people. We need your help to get other people to vote. Let me tell you what we’re doing.
(People often misunderstood what we were doing, and if you could swiftly correct the misunderstanding, you had yourself a very easy target for the rap. This person is probably politically aware, since they are registered, but not enough to have thought about the complexities of electoral patterns and campaigns. Our plea to them can create a small realization that more needs to be done, an awareness of activity, out there.)
"Not right now.”
Well sir, there’s only X days left until the election, and with Y (just having happened/about to happen) we need your help more than ever.
(Another easy front. A good canvasser can break it with a deft, witty, or otherwise appealing volley.)
“I’ll do it with my vote”
Do you vote in a swing state?
(The response above is risky – for one, some people walking through Manhattan are from Pennsylvania, or even Ohio. Even Jersey, which was swinging just enough to discomfort, what with all that gubernatorial butt-sex out in the open – so yes, you would have to concede that a vote in New Jersey is ‘important,’ but still -- .
The other problem with this is that the person might not really feel the thrust of the question. They might not really think about swing states, and your response would simply not register.
This is a tough one, because the response is based in a literalist interpretation of voting and democratic responsibility. It is an answer that, in strict terms, passes our ‘test’ – yes, the person does want to beat George Bush, and he or she will do it at the polls as will all other responsible citizens – so why would they have any business with you?
A different way to phrase it is: In New York, that’s just not enough. This was the reflexive answer for me – because the logic is more direct, and brutal – but for some reason it was significantly less successful. Logic needs to be slick and easy to get someone to stop.)
"I’m already doing it."
Well let me tell you what we’re doing.
(This one is also tough, as it’s really more of a dismissal than a response. It might be tempting to respond sardonically – Oh, great! You’re on the case. Well I guess we can all go home now, thanks I’ll tell the others – although that really only serves to pop your own top. This is the response of someone who may or may not be giving in other ways, but in any case does not believe that this way is worth their resources.
You’ve got the standard set of options – we need your help for the swing states, or we need your help right now because of X, or are you doing it on a grassroots level -- sometimes these do you some good.
Also, you can somehow express to them the personal element of the campaign – well, I need your help because I am going to be going to the swing states to knock on doors – but basically anything that is going to work here will work by dint of sheer charisma.)
“Why are you here, in New York City!?”
(This question should have been the ideal prompt for the rap, it taps right on the very reason for us to be here. But the person who said it would usually be angry. In fact, the person was often so angry as to be unwilling to listen when you tried to tell them: that we’re here in the country’s liberal stronghold because we need its help in order to reach those areas that don’t have this kind of Democratic community, but need it desperately. It didn’t matter that your answer directly addressed their question – usually, they didn’t want to hear it. I don’t know, maybe they felt like just living in New York City fulfilled their responsibility, and that it could not be held responsible for the rest of the country’s actions.)
"I already gave."
That’s great! When was the last time you gave?
(This was, increasingly, the most common response. As the summer went on, people were hit up from a thousand angles at once – most of the people who were willing to give had given at least once already by the time I signed on. This, of course, didn’t cover their tab as far as we were concerned – someone who gave already is still more likely to give you money than the next person behind them. You just have to remind them that their help is still needed.
I found this to be the toughest exchange, and it was increasingly the most crucial. If someone said within two weeks, I would just say Good for you! Thanks for your support! Thumbs up, make them feel appreciated.
If it had been longer, I’d say something like Well we haven’t beaten him yet! Or, time to give again! Or, Didn’t it feel good?)
Once you’ve got someone stopped, your job is halfway done. Another quarter is getting the clipboard in their hands, and the rap – though deliberately worded and sequenced – is mostly just stuffing. Many people get the idea right away, and will be impatient with the rap. Either your manner makes them want to give, or their resistance bears out; the rap doesn’t reveal or reason so much as it provides you with words that can function as emotional levers. A successful canvass makes an appeal become a connection and then a transaction – there is no need discussion, any more than there is for negotiation.
That said, there are a few responses you can expect people to make once they’ve stopped:
“Sure, I’ll sign.”
Actually, we’re out here asking for more than just signatures…
(This a rather slick evasion, the offer to sign. It is hard for the canvasser not to be greatly annoyed by someone jumping right up to get the pen in their hand, only to recoil with a nasty face when you ask for more – why would we be out here, pouring sweat all over Manhattan, busting our asses for a bunch of signatures? Don’t you know how deep the shit we’re in is? It’s going to take a whole lot more than petitions to stop George Bush. The trick is to make them grasp the enormity of the situation in the same breath as the insufficiency of the act of signing a piece of paper; add a pinch of shame, and immediately after that smother it with the goodness and nobility of the cause.
Even then, these people will rarely if ever give you a hundred dollars. Shoot for fifty, grab for twenty.)
"Can I just give online?”
You sure could, but this right here is a grassroots level.
(This one was the most troubling response. Yes, of course people could give online, although you could expect that many of them would just forget to do so. Especially once we discovered that our money from the street didn’t go to any ‘special fund,’ this required the most maneuvering -- )
We’re showing the Democratic party that this kind of campaign – face-to-face dialogue between real committed people – actually works. It’s time to start bringing people back together in our politics, and this election is showing that we can do that more than anyone expected. It reminds the Party that people want to be talked to, listened to. Plus, your support helps keep us out here every day – spreading the word, building morale, getting people hyped, pissing off Republicans…
"I can't give that much money."
(The only way to get at this one is to have fun with it. Make up ridiculous reasons to give specific amounts (a popular one is that $217 is the price of a plane ticket from DC to Crawford Texas). Guilt them by asking if they are planning to go out to dinner at a restaurant in New York City sometime this week, or month. Ask them how much their last night out at a bar cost them. Come on, you’ve got Netflix! This is a good reason to catch up on your movies. Stay in on Friday night and watch the West Wing. Walk to work next week, lose some of those pounds….
The fact is that people do have money, especially people here in this city. It is not every day that they are able to do something good with that money – you are out there to help them.)
Once people are ready to give you money, it is crucial that you set the terms of how much. Set high. The only way you can do this is if you truly believe that there is nothing better that they can do with this money, or, alternatively, you can act really fucking well.
* * *
* * *
* * *
The zennest way to approach canvassing—and it really does require a certain amount of zen, if you are planning on keeping with it for more than two or three days—is to play it like fly-fishing. You are standing in a stream, posture firm, legs slightly apart. The vast majority of people who will pass you on the street are not your quarry. They are the water; they don’t care for your mission—or, more likely, they are hardly aware of any mission at all. They are the flow. Become at peace with the flow; the flow is neverending, you cannot stop it. You are planted within the flow, set amid it but not against it; you are enveloped and it rushes past and always onward. Your quarry will hither to you, its instincts will spring it forth from the flow. So make your cast, calling to people when they are a good ten paces away, allowing yourself time to answer their response. Your cast flits in the flow, but do not allow it to be subsumed into the flow. As soon as your cast lands unheeded, begin to cast again; you are the focus point of a looped arc. Eventually, your cast will strike a target, and you and the target will be frozen together as the flow continues onward.
If you cannot foster a sense of this duality—of isolation and immersion—then the fact that you are asking thousands of people for money will be inescapable and suffocating.
This work is not hard – but it is tough. If you’re not careful, it’s hard on your feet and brutal on your soul. In the New York Office, with its staff of 60 or so, a few canvassers would drop out each day. As far as our mission is concerned, however, each canvasser had a numerical value: each canvasser – even the ones who are just good or competent – brings in hundreds of dollars a day. The logic of numbers out on the street applies in the office as well. Therefore, canvassing is really only half of the operation – the other half is recruiting and training more canvassers.
But his by no means makes it ok to not call them, even if you think you’re sure they won’t respond. You really never know when an exception will walk by, and anyway, it is both politically correct and zen to make your cast without interruptions, hesitation or discrimination. The smart canvasser plays this to his advantage – she finds pockets of untapped sources, people who didn’t expect to be approached themselves, who are startled by the very question Do you want to help beat George Bush and who cross over from the faceless stream into the realm of political participation in the very instant that the canvasser raps them.
Nevertheless: the majority of the people out here don’t want to speak to you. The majority, of course, is not your concern.
All it takes is a handful of people out of the hundreds who will walk by you in a day; your job is to connect with them when the time comes. Some of them you will catch at the right moment, for whatever reason they will give you $100 straight off – they’d been meaning to do it, they just got paid, they just saw Farenheight 9/11 again, or they just got off the phone with their granmother or some shit like that. Even beginners snag them; that’s what makes the operation work for almost anyone. But a good canvasser does something more.
* * *
Canvassing is a skill, there is no doubt about that. There are techniques, Some people surprise themselves when they find out that they are able to get people to give them money; many others don’t make it through a full day. But even though the fundamental requirement is that you feel comfortable talking to strangers, there is also a defined set of tools with which you can equip yourself. Of course, nobody wants to talk to anyone else on the street. A walk down the street is for many people a private act – they might be looking around them, but they don’t care to be looked at, much less approached. They also don’t expect you. When you greet them, it is going to catch them a little off guard, and as a result, their response is going to be very similar each time. As a canvasser, you grow used to hearing the very same small set of responses from everyone; through training and experience, the canvassers acquires a matching set of rejoinders. A breakdown:
“I don’t have time.”
This will only take a few minutes, and it’s really important.
(Except for people who are actually late to an appointment, everyone has time. This is a weak front, easily penetrated.)
“I don’t have any money on me.”
Well let me tell you what we’re doing.
(Snag yourself some wiggle room. Almost everyone carries some kind of currency on them – this statement could very well be true they were to say it to a bum, as in “I don’t have any change on me,” but they probably aren’t wandering about without $. Still, you can’t quite blurt out “We take credit cards and checks!” Gotta get them to stop first.)
“I’m already registered.”
That’s great, but we’re not out here to register people. We need your help to get other people to vote. Let me tell you what we’re doing.
(People often misunderstood what we were doing, and if you could swiftly correct the misunderstanding, you had yourself a very easy target for the rap. This person is probably politically aware, since they are registered, but not enough to have thought about the complexities of electoral patterns and campaigns. Our plea to them can create a small realization that more needs to be done, an awareness of activity, out there.)
"Not right now.”
Well sir, there’s only X days left until the election, and with Y (just having happened/about to happen) we need your help more than ever.
(Another easy front. A good canvasser can break it with a deft, witty, or otherwise appealing volley.)
“I’ll do it with my vote”
Do you vote in a swing state?
(The response above is risky – for one, some people walking through Manhattan are from Pennsylvania, or even Ohio. Even Jersey, which was swinging just enough to discomfort, what with all that gubernatorial butt-sex out in the open – so yes, you would have to concede that a vote in New Jersey is ‘important,’ but still -- .
The other problem with this is that the person might not really feel the thrust of the question. They might not really think about swing states, and your response would simply not register.
This is a tough one, because the response is based in a literalist interpretation of voting and democratic responsibility. It is an answer that, in strict terms, passes our ‘test’ – yes, the person does want to beat George Bush, and he or she will do it at the polls as will all other responsible citizens – so why would they have any business with you?
A different way to phrase it is: In New York, that’s just not enough. This was the reflexive answer for me – because the logic is more direct, and brutal – but for some reason it was significantly less successful. Logic needs to be slick and easy to get someone to stop.)
"I’m already doing it."
Well let me tell you what we’re doing.
(This one is also tough, as it’s really more of a dismissal than a response. It might be tempting to respond sardonically – Oh, great! You’re on the case. Well I guess we can all go home now, thanks I’ll tell the others – although that really only serves to pop your own top. This is the response of someone who may or may not be giving in other ways, but in any case does not believe that this way is worth their resources.
You’ve got the standard set of options – we need your help for the swing states, or we need your help right now because of X, or are you doing it on a grassroots level -- sometimes these do you some good.
Also, you can somehow express to them the personal element of the campaign – well, I need your help because I am going to be going to the swing states to knock on doors – but basically anything that is going to work here will work by dint of sheer charisma.)
“Why are you here, in New York City!?”
(This question should have been the ideal prompt for the rap, it taps right on the very reason for us to be here. But the person who said it would usually be angry. In fact, the person was often so angry as to be unwilling to listen when you tried to tell them: that we’re here in the country’s liberal stronghold because we need its help in order to reach those areas that don’t have this kind of Democratic community, but need it desperately. It didn’t matter that your answer directly addressed their question – usually, they didn’t want to hear it. I don’t know, maybe they felt like just living in New York City fulfilled their responsibility, and that it could not be held responsible for the rest of the country’s actions.)
"I already gave."
That’s great! When was the last time you gave?
(This was, increasingly, the most common response. As the summer went on, people were hit up from a thousand angles at once – most of the people who were willing to give had given at least once already by the time I signed on. This, of course, didn’t cover their tab as far as we were concerned – someone who gave already is still more likely to give you money than the next person behind them. You just have to remind them that their help is still needed.
I found this to be the toughest exchange, and it was increasingly the most crucial. If someone said within two weeks, I would just say Good for you! Thanks for your support! Thumbs up, make them feel appreciated.
If it had been longer, I’d say something like Well we haven’t beaten him yet! Or, time to give again! Or, Didn’t it feel good?)
Once you’ve got someone stopped, your job is halfway done. Another quarter is getting the clipboard in their hands, and the rap – though deliberately worded and sequenced – is mostly just stuffing. Many people get the idea right away, and will be impatient with the rap. Either your manner makes them want to give, or their resistance bears out; the rap doesn’t reveal or reason so much as it provides you with words that can function as emotional levers. A successful canvass makes an appeal become a connection and then a transaction – there is no need discussion, any more than there is for negotiation.
That said, there are a few responses you can expect people to make once they’ve stopped:
“Sure, I’ll sign.”
Actually, we’re out here asking for more than just signatures…
(This a rather slick evasion, the offer to sign. It is hard for the canvasser not to be greatly annoyed by someone jumping right up to get the pen in their hand, only to recoil with a nasty face when you ask for more – why would we be out here, pouring sweat all over Manhattan, busting our asses for a bunch of signatures? Don’t you know how deep the shit we’re in is? It’s going to take a whole lot more than petitions to stop George Bush. The trick is to make them grasp the enormity of the situation in the same breath as the insufficiency of the act of signing a piece of paper; add a pinch of shame, and immediately after that smother it with the goodness and nobility of the cause.
Even then, these people will rarely if ever give you a hundred dollars. Shoot for fifty, grab for twenty.)
"Can I just give online?”
You sure could, but this right here is a grassroots level.
(This one was the most troubling response. Yes, of course people could give online, although you could expect that many of them would just forget to do so. Especially once we discovered that our money from the street didn’t go to any ‘special fund,’ this required the most maneuvering -- )
We’re showing the Democratic party that this kind of campaign – face-to-face dialogue between real committed people – actually works. It’s time to start bringing people back together in our politics, and this election is showing that we can do that more than anyone expected. It reminds the Party that people want to be talked to, listened to. Plus, your support helps keep us out here every day – spreading the word, building morale, getting people hyped, pissing off Republicans…
"I can't give that much money."
(The only way to get at this one is to have fun with it. Make up ridiculous reasons to give specific amounts (a popular one is that $217 is the price of a plane ticket from DC to Crawford Texas). Guilt them by asking if they are planning to go out to dinner at a restaurant in New York City sometime this week, or month. Ask them how much their last night out at a bar cost them. Come on, you’ve got Netflix! This is a good reason to catch up on your movies. Stay in on Friday night and watch the West Wing. Walk to work next week, lose some of those pounds….
The fact is that people do have money, especially people here in this city. It is not every day that they are able to do something good with that money – you are out there to help them.)
Once people are ready to give you money, it is crucial that you set the terms of how much. Set high. The only way you can do this is if you truly believe that there is nothing better that they can do with this money, or, alternatively, you can act really fucking well.
* * *
* * *
* * *
The zennest way to approach canvassing—and it really does require a certain amount of zen, if you are planning on keeping with it for more than two or three days—is to play it like fly-fishing. You are standing in a stream, posture firm, legs slightly apart. The vast majority of people who will pass you on the street are not your quarry. They are the water; they don’t care for your mission—or, more likely, they are hardly aware of any mission at all. They are the flow. Become at peace with the flow; the flow is neverending, you cannot stop it. You are planted within the flow, set amid it but not against it; you are enveloped and it rushes past and always onward. Your quarry will hither to you, its instincts will spring it forth from the flow. So make your cast, calling to people when they are a good ten paces away, allowing yourself time to answer their response. Your cast flits in the flow, but do not allow it to be subsumed into the flow. As soon as your cast lands unheeded, begin to cast again; you are the focus point of a looped arc. Eventually, your cast will strike a target, and you and the target will be frozen together as the flow continues onward.
If you cannot foster a sense of this duality—of isolation and immersion—then the fact that you are asking thousands of people for money will be inescapable and suffocating.
This work is not hard – but it is tough. If you’re not careful, it’s hard on your feet and brutal on your soul. In the New York Office, with its staff of 60 or so, a few canvassers would drop out each day. As far as our mission is concerned, however, each canvasser had a numerical value: each canvasser – even the ones who are just good or competent – brings in hundreds of dollars a day. The logic of numbers out on the street applies in the office as well. Therefore, canvassing is really only half of the operation – the other half is recruiting and training more canvassers.
posted by Greg Bloom at 6/05/2005 10:44:00 PM
Rivers run through it
Go to a window in a tall building that overlooks a street with regular foot traffic. Look down at the people walking below. From that vantage point, walking down the sidewalk seems to be as defined and orderly an action as driving down a busy street. People walk in pretty straight lines, at regular intervals from each other, and they tend to pick up the same speed; given a long block with few disruptions, every pedestrian will match each other’s stride; feet will move in near-unison. There is occasionally a breakaway, someone in a hurry or someone stopped, but for the most part it is a steady stream. _____
Of course, especially in a dense urban area, each block has its own rhythm. A thousand factors influence this, and few of them are immediately apparent to the eye. But they are all different, each street with its own personality. Any given block will have a set of people on it, although of course in some areas, this set is more defined. Nevertheless, the mix of people on one block will generally be different from just a block away – sometimes ever so slightly, but sometimes greatly.
There are smart places to be, and stupid places to be. A large organic grocery store was veritably a gold mine (and yet to me it felt almost too easy to work there, too obvious, opportunist). A five block radius from an upscale department store having a big sale is a boon. Anywhere in which the scene is disrupted by some physical or psychic disturbance is inadvisable: areas near busy and loud intersections, near construction, in front of doctor’s offices, under garish billboards. Standing near an ATM is a sure way to send people away from you as if you were magnetized.
How many of the people on a given street would even talk to us? Well you gotta figure this: one half of all the people in the country don’t vote and don’t care. One quarter loves the president. Say (very unscientifically!) three quarters of those who don’t like the president really don’t like the president. (following, here? We’re at three-sixteenths I think.) One third of those who don’t like the President will be willing to stop, talk and give money to someone on the street. So…again, very unscientifically…one out of every sixteen people who walk down the street will stop.
The difference between a good canvasser and a bad canvasser is that a good canvasser gets two out of those three people to give them money – or maybe even gets one of the other two sixteenths to stop – while a bad canvasser will get one or none to give money.
The difference b/w a great canvasser and a good canvasser is that in any given day the great canvasser will get one of, say, six of those one-sixteenths to give $100 or more. These numbers (even if I am not quite accurate in them) really do make sense – raising money is not necessarily about luck (although every so often $1K or even $2K would fall out of the sky onto someone) but about playing to these numbers.
In New York City, these numbers are significantly higher than almost anywhere else in the country – so is the density of the foot traffic. And the capacity for donations. With a few exceptions (in the areas with more defined ‘population sets’ – Chinatown, Harlem, etc) you can make money on every street in Manhattan, no matter who is on it. You might have to canvass a bit differently in the financial district than you do in the West Village – but the adjustments are subtle, almost cosmetic. 60 people standing on the streets of NYC asking for money to help beat George Bush in an election are going to make themselves a lot of money, no matter how trained they are. If they know what they are doing, well…
This made New York City the centerpiece of Grassroots Campaigns’ DNC canvassing operation.
Of course, especially in a dense urban area, each block has its own rhythm. A thousand factors influence this, and few of them are immediately apparent to the eye. But they are all different, each street with its own personality. Any given block will have a set of people on it, although of course in some areas, this set is more defined. Nevertheless, the mix of people on one block will generally be different from just a block away – sometimes ever so slightly, but sometimes greatly.
There are smart places to be, and stupid places to be. A large organic grocery store was veritably a gold mine (and yet to me it felt almost too easy to work there, too obvious, opportunist). A five block radius from an upscale department store having a big sale is a boon. Anywhere in which the scene is disrupted by some physical or psychic disturbance is inadvisable: areas near busy and loud intersections, near construction, in front of doctor’s offices, under garish billboards. Standing near an ATM is a sure way to send people away from you as if you were magnetized.
How many of the people on a given street would even talk to us? Well you gotta figure this: one half of all the people in the country don’t vote and don’t care. One quarter loves the president. Say (very unscientifically!) three quarters of those who don’t like the president really don’t like the president. (following, here? We’re at three-sixteenths I think.) One third of those who don’t like the President will be willing to stop, talk and give money to someone on the street. So…again, very unscientifically…one out of every sixteen people who walk down the street will stop.
The difference between a good canvasser and a bad canvasser is that a good canvasser gets two out of those three people to give them money – or maybe even gets one of the other two sixteenths to stop – while a bad canvasser will get one or none to give money.
The difference b/w a great canvasser and a good canvasser is that in any given day the great canvasser will get one of, say, six of those one-sixteenths to give $100 or more. These numbers (even if I am not quite accurate in them) really do make sense – raising money is not necessarily about luck (although every so often $1K or even $2K would fall out of the sky onto someone) but about playing to these numbers.
In New York City, these numbers are significantly higher than almost anywhere else in the country – so is the density of the foot traffic. And the capacity for donations. With a few exceptions (in the areas with more defined ‘population sets’ – Chinatown, Harlem, etc) you can make money on every street in Manhattan, no matter who is on it. You might have to canvass a bit differently in the financial district than you do in the West Village – but the adjustments are subtle, almost cosmetic. 60 people standing on the streets of NYC asking for money to help beat George Bush in an election are going to make themselves a lot of money, no matter how trained they are. If they know what they are doing, well…
This made New York City the centerpiece of Grassroots Campaigns’ DNC canvassing operation.
posted by Greg Bloom at 6/05/2005 10:41:00 PM
'Get incorporated!'
Street canvassing is, in the world of modern public campaigns, an ancient art. Scratch that -- canvassing is, at this point, a science.
The potential of the canvass as a form of political action was demonstrated in the early 70’s, by the incredible success of George McGovern’s targeted grassroots campaigning in the ’72 Presidential primaries. During the mid-to-late 70’s, as the burgeoning network of Public Interest Research Group organizations (PIRGs) developed both an ethos and a business framework for youth-oriented civic engagement, canvassing fulfilled their two central goals: the call for simple, focused public activity for young people, and the need for a financial structure by which the PIRGs could sustain adaptive, long-term campaigns. As a result, the ‘tactic’ of canvassing gradually matured into a concrete formula with proven effectiveness.
By the turn of the millenium, the PIRGs had grown from local, autonomous, largely student-run organizations into a sprawling but highly-centralized non-profit empire. The Fund for Public Interest Research, as the central national apparatus is called, had close ties to dozens of state PIRG organizations, as well as environmental lobbying and campaign groups like GreenCorps and Telefund. Though the name declares that the organizations are involved in research, it is widely acknowledged that the “research” undertaken by Fund organizations is marginal. The primary enterprise of these organizations is canvassing operations. These operations are largely seasonal (they depend on the summer months for student availability) and are managed through a hierarchy of people that mostly began their careers as canvassers in the PIRGs. Those who stay on in the PIRGs move up from canvasser to staff director, to office director, and so on.
* * *
Shortly before graduating Duke, I attended an information session for some kind of PIRG organization – all I knew about it was that PIRG was more or less the primary option available to graduates interested in ‘social work jobs’. I was somewhat intrigued by the presentation (jobs on a campaign for progressive agendas, largely environmental) and flattered when invited to a “national orientation” for new PIRG trainees. I put my name down for the Orientation, but for whatever reason – probably because I hated the idea of a job more vividly than I liked the idea of saving the environment – I didn’t follow through.
* * *
In 2003, the conception of Grassroots Campaigns, Incorporated (GCI) marks what I believe to be a watershed of sorts for this public campaign movement, which was started in large part by the efforts and influence of Ralph Nader, and developed in large part by GCI founder Doug Phelps. Phelps’ GCI is a for-profit company, structured like a concentrated PIRG – a tightly-knit core group of executive officers, five in total, all of them top-level PIRG officers with many years of experience with these campaigns, that swiftly recruited hundreds of canvassers and office managers in dozens of cities to run targeted campaigns for partisan organizations.
GCI’s “outsourcing” of canvassing operations is not unique – in the last five or six years, several companies have begun to offer very similar models “for hire” to various interest groups. But the other factor that signals the company as a step into a new threshold of public campaigning is its foray into electoral politics. GCI’s first two contracts were fundraising for the Democratic National Committee and “get out the vote” for MoveOn PAC. This brought the canvassing movement once again to the frontlines of the Presidential campaign.
* * *
I have been told that the founders of Grassroots Campaigns, Incorporated deliberated for some time over its name. It is not clear whether it was conceived with irony.
The potential of the canvass as a form of political action was demonstrated in the early 70’s, by the incredible success of George McGovern’s targeted grassroots campaigning in the ’72 Presidential primaries. During the mid-to-late 70’s, as the burgeoning network of Public Interest Research Group organizations (PIRGs) developed both an ethos and a business framework for youth-oriented civic engagement, canvassing fulfilled their two central goals: the call for simple, focused public activity for young people, and the need for a financial structure by which the PIRGs could sustain adaptive, long-term campaigns. As a result, the ‘tactic’ of canvassing gradually matured into a concrete formula with proven effectiveness.
By the turn of the millenium, the PIRGs had grown from local, autonomous, largely student-run organizations into a sprawling but highly-centralized non-profit empire. The Fund for Public Interest Research, as the central national apparatus is called, had close ties to dozens of state PIRG organizations, as well as environmental lobbying and campaign groups like GreenCorps and Telefund. Though the name declares that the organizations are involved in research, it is widely acknowledged that the “research” undertaken by Fund organizations is marginal. The primary enterprise of these organizations is canvassing operations. These operations are largely seasonal (they depend on the summer months for student availability) and are managed through a hierarchy of people that mostly began their careers as canvassers in the PIRGs. Those who stay on in the PIRGs move up from canvasser to staff director, to office director, and so on.
* * *
Shortly before graduating Duke, I attended an information session for some kind of PIRG organization – all I knew about it was that PIRG was more or less the primary option available to graduates interested in ‘social work jobs’. I was somewhat intrigued by the presentation (jobs on a campaign for progressive agendas, largely environmental) and flattered when invited to a “national orientation” for new PIRG trainees. I put my name down for the Orientation, but for whatever reason – probably because I hated the idea of a job more vividly than I liked the idea of saving the environment – I didn’t follow through.
* * *
In 2003, the conception of Grassroots Campaigns, Incorporated (GCI) marks what I believe to be a watershed of sorts for this public campaign movement, which was started in large part by the efforts and influence of Ralph Nader, and developed in large part by GCI founder Doug Phelps. Phelps’ GCI is a for-profit company, structured like a concentrated PIRG – a tightly-knit core group of executive officers, five in total, all of them top-level PIRG officers with many years of experience with these campaigns, that swiftly recruited hundreds of canvassers and office managers in dozens of cities to run targeted campaigns for partisan organizations.
GCI’s “outsourcing” of canvassing operations is not unique – in the last five or six years, several companies have begun to offer very similar models “for hire” to various interest groups. But the other factor that signals the company as a step into a new threshold of public campaigning is its foray into electoral politics. GCI’s first two contracts were fundraising for the Democratic National Committee and “get out the vote” for MoveOn PAC. This brought the canvassing movement once again to the frontlines of the Presidential campaign.
* * *
I have been told that the founders of Grassroots Campaigns, Incorporated deliberated for some time over its name. It is not clear whether it was conceived with irony.
posted by Greg Bloom at 6/05/2005 10:38:00 PM
Civic Engagement and the Canvass
The following quotes are from a study conducted by CIRCLE in the summer of 2003 and released in January 2005, about the patterns and effects of canvassing campaigns upon the young people who participate in them. The study cites canvassing as one of the more prevalent and active channels of civic engagement for youths in the country, and cites a study to the effect that
“… 7 percent of participants between the ages of 15-37 had participated in a canvass at one time or another…"
“[T]he summer canvass has become a popular tool for a diverse array of organizations and it exposes thousands of young people a year to political work….
in the United States runs between 55-75 canvass offices around the country.8 ….[C]anvassers tend to be…engaged young people who are going through the transition to adulthood. … ‘a crucial time during which lifelong trajectories of civic participation are formed.’” [p.6]
“The canvass office experience supports the development of a community of activists. New canvassers draw energy from their peers. With so many committed young people in a room rallying each other through chants and cheers, it is easy to become more involved.”
As one canvasser explained: “Yes. I feel like [canvassing is] the best [way of confronting political problems]. I feel like there’s such a problem with ignorance and apathy and not that that’s necessarily a fault of the public. I feel like the political system is kind of amorphous to a lot of people and that...not everyone gets to be a political activist as their job. This is a way to shift the power from the legislator to the public. So we’re going around talking to regular people and if they don’t get involved, they at least know something” [p.7]
Another canvasser, 558 from Atlanta, adds:
“I meet people every day who are, you know, basically practically waiting for me...I come to their door and they’re, like, ‘oh, you know, this is exactly what I want to do...I want to make a difference.’ It’s just like they are waiting for that opportunity in the most perfect of ways and this is, like, an ideal chance for them to really say... ‘Yeah I did feel helpless, I didn’t think there was anything I can do.’” [p.8]
* * *
* * *
“In the past five years, canvassing has exploded as a form of gaining grassroots support for national and state-centered political campaigns. Although originally run by the offices of multiple national organizations, the grassroots campaigns for leftleaning organizations have been consolidated. Instead of each organization running campaign offices around the country that train and manage canvassers to work on their grassroots campaigns, it is easier and less expensive for one organization to be paid to run them all. Therefore, beginning in the late 1990s, many progressive national organizations began to outsource their grassroots campaigns. This consolidation of grassroots activism has had serious effects on the way that these grassroots campaigns take place.”
[p. 12-3]
“… 7 percent of participants between the ages of 15-37 had participated in a canvass at one time or another…"
“[T]he summer canvass has become a popular tool for a diverse array of organizations and it exposes thousands of young people a year to political work….
in the United States runs between 55-75 canvass offices around the country.8 ….[C]anvassers tend to be…engaged young people who are going through the transition to adulthood. … ‘a crucial time during which lifelong trajectories of civic participation are formed.’” [p.6]
“The canvass office experience supports the development of a community of activists. New canvassers draw energy from their peers. With so many committed young people in a room rallying each other through chants and cheers, it is easy to become more involved.”
As one canvasser explained: “Yes. I feel like [canvassing is] the best [way of confronting political problems]. I feel like there’s such a problem with ignorance and apathy and not that that’s necessarily a fault of the public. I feel like the political system is kind of amorphous to a lot of people and that...not everyone gets to be a political activist as their job. This is a way to shift the power from the legislator to the public. So we’re going around talking to regular people and if they don’t get involved, they at least know something” [p.7]
Another canvasser, 558 from Atlanta, adds:
“I meet people every day who are, you know, basically practically waiting for me...I come to their door and they’re, like, ‘oh, you know, this is exactly what I want to do...I want to make a difference.’ It’s just like they are waiting for that opportunity in the most perfect of ways and this is, like, an ideal chance for them to really say... ‘Yeah I did feel helpless, I didn’t think there was anything I can do.’” [p.8]
* * *
* * *
“In the past five years, canvassing has exploded as a form of gaining grassroots support for national and state-centered political campaigns. Although originally run by the offices of multiple national organizations, the grassroots campaigns for leftleaning organizations have been consolidated. Instead of each organization running campaign offices around the country that train and manage canvassers to work on their grassroots campaigns, it is easier and less expensive for one organization to be paid to run them all. Therefore, beginning in the late 1990s, many progressive national organizations began to outsource their grassroots campaigns. This consolidation of grassroots activism has had serious effects on the way that these grassroots campaigns take place.”
[p. 12-3]
posted by Greg Bloom at 6/05/2005 10:23:00 PM
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
I am playing with this post, maybe it will be a real post some day
You are late to work but it’s a nice day outside, and you’re enjoying the walk. On the subway just a minute ago, you’d caught the headline of a nasty story in that detestable New York Post – something about the ‘questions’ arising about Kerry’s military records. It just makes you so mad, the anger is still stinging even as the weather makes you smile. You catch a glimpse, though, of the Post headline again at a newsstand, and then suddenly –
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
` A kid, you hadn’t seen him until he spoke to you, but you’re walking right toward him now. He is sweating a little, but smiling big.
“I’m on it already,” you tell the kid, index finger and thumb circling in an ‘ok’ sign. You sent in a check last month, after watching Kerry and Edwards at the Democratic National Convention. Days later, through the mail came a glossy photo of the two of them, smiling holding hands, which you’d proudly tacked up to your cubicle at work. You don’t care if some Bushie sees it; in fact, you’d like them to.
That’s great! But we still need your help.
The kid is reaching out his hand, his other hand holding a clipboard at his side. You slow down in front of him, thinking of the Post story.
“We need all the help we can get. But I’ve already done it, I got the picture and everything.”
The kid’s eyes light up, in gratitude and excitement.
That’s great! When was the last time you gave?
“About a month ago, I guess.”
He cocks his head and says,
A month ago -- it’s like a totally different election now! I appreciate your support sir, but we still need your help. I’m sure you’ve seen the ads they’re running – they’ll stop at nothing to remain in power. But there are unprecedented numbers of people supporting the Kerry campaign, and we’re out here today with the DNC, working to keep it that way. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you how important this election is, but did you know that Bush has had all this month to raise money, when Kerry couldn’t? With the Republican National Convention coming up next week we need to push harder than ever.
The kid hands you his clipboard as he says this. You look at it, seeing only a bunch of lines on a form, and realize that you see these DNC people out here every damn day. Still, you’re thankful someone is doing it.
“OK OK, what do you want from me?”
Well, sir, this is our statement of support. It says that you support John Kerry and other Democrats’ bid for office. Today we’re asking for a donation of $100.
A hundred dollars!? That’s ballsy.
Sir, this money is going to help send me and hundreds of other people to the swing states, where we’ll be pounding the pavement, knocking on doors, doing whatever it takes to make sure that we get as many people to the polls and that we don’t allow what happened in 2000 to happen again.
You reach for your wallet. “How do you want it?”
The best way is by check or credit card donation.
Suddenly, the clipboard in your hand is open to a credit card slip.
Exciting, a little bit, to be doing this in person, out here on the street, as opposed to just mailing in a check. As you’re signing the credit card form, the kid says,
Nice day, isn’t it?
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
` A kid, you hadn’t seen him until he spoke to you, but you’re walking right toward him now. He is sweating a little, but smiling big.
“I’m on it already,” you tell the kid, index finger and thumb circling in an ‘ok’ sign. You sent in a check last month, after watching Kerry and Edwards at the Democratic National Convention. Days later, through the mail came a glossy photo of the two of them, smiling holding hands, which you’d proudly tacked up to your cubicle at work. You don’t care if some Bushie sees it; in fact, you’d like them to.
That’s great! But we still need your help.
The kid is reaching out his hand, his other hand holding a clipboard at his side. You slow down in front of him, thinking of the Post story.
“We need all the help we can get. But I’ve already done it, I got the picture and everything.”
The kid’s eyes light up, in gratitude and excitement.
That’s great! When was the last time you gave?
“About a month ago, I guess.”
He cocks his head and says,
A month ago -- it’s like a totally different election now! I appreciate your support sir, but we still need your help. I’m sure you’ve seen the ads they’re running – they’ll stop at nothing to remain in power. But there are unprecedented numbers of people supporting the Kerry campaign, and we’re out here today with the DNC, working to keep it that way. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you how important this election is, but did you know that Bush has had all this month to raise money, when Kerry couldn’t? With the Republican National Convention coming up next week we need to push harder than ever.
The kid hands you his clipboard as he says this. You look at it, seeing only a bunch of lines on a form, and realize that you see these DNC people out here every damn day. Still, you’re thankful someone is doing it.
“OK OK, what do you want from me?”
Well, sir, this is our statement of support. It says that you support John Kerry and other Democrats’ bid for office. Today we’re asking for a donation of $100.
A hundred dollars!? That’s ballsy.
Sir, this money is going to help send me and hundreds of other people to the swing states, where we’ll be pounding the pavement, knocking on doors, doing whatever it takes to make sure that we get as many people to the polls and that we don’t allow what happened in 2000 to happen again.
You reach for your wallet. “How do you want it?”
The best way is by check or credit card donation.
Suddenly, the clipboard in your hand is open to a credit card slip.
Exciting, a little bit, to be doing this in person, out here on the street, as opposed to just mailing in a check. As you’re signing the credit card form, the kid says,
Nice day, isn’t it?
posted by Greg Bloom at 6/01/2005 11:51:00 PM
Cha-ching
It had been a tough day, but somehow we’d all managed to make quota. We were coming back with right around $1000. Lispenard was already streaming with canvassers when we showed up, some sitting on the front stoop and having a smoke. One of the crews walked dejectedly up the stairs in front of us – when director M____ took their FM’s sheet at the door, I was secretly relieved to see his face. A sigh and a scowl. At least we weren’t the worst crew. Two of this crew had made less than $80, and only the FM had made quota (barely). M_____ murmured something to the FM, and the crew shuffled off to count their paltry haul dejectedly. When I handed my slip to M____, he didn’t really react more than a slight nod.
Cashout seemed at first glance like a disorderly, even chaotic process. Everyone pulled up metal chairs, or sat right there on the floor, and counted the money out into loose piles. As they did so, the stereo blasted music – usually, Lil John’s “Get Low” – and traded stories from out there on the street.
“I talked to this guy for twenty minutes, and he said he would go right to the ATM. I figured, nah forget about it, but he came back! I couldn’t believe it – hundred bucks cash.”
“I got fifty from a Republican!”
“This guy tried to, like, grab me. I screamed and a cop actually saw it. Thank God, what a creep! I’m like, hello.”
The canvassers that weren’t talking were paying close attention to each entry. Every donation needed to be transcribed again on another sheet, including the donor’s address, phone number, email, currency form and amount. For those who had a good amount of donors, this could take a long time. Brows furrowed, pens chewed. People trying to descramble signature scrawl, make out scribbled addresses; others relived each transaction aloud as they went through their piles – people who they talked to for fifteen minutes and gave five bucks; improbable hundos; strange occupations, like ‘futurologist.’ Those who had pulled in big sat with their chests pumped up; those who hadn’t slumped in their chair, looking as if they had spent a good bit of their six hours out there running. Directors roamed the seated crowd, helping to cash out, chatting people up, assessing the take.
Mike came over as I was checking the sums of my crew. He asked how I did – “So so. Better than those guys,” I said, nodding in the direction of the crew that had come in just before us. There were loud complaints coming from them. Whenever anyone approached them, there would be a comment about how the street they had been sent to was “busted turf.”
“Yeah, well,” he said like talking about a misbehaving child, “turf, especially in Manhattan, can never really be busted. There’s hardly a street on this island where you can’t make quota if you know what you’re doing.” Director M____ had walked over and taken the FM aside to talk. Mike nodded at them, “I think that’s probably it for C____. He was on probation already, and he only brought in 120 today.”
C____ was one of the few non-whites working in the office. I didn’t know him, but he seemed pretty well-liked by everyone, and from what I’d seen in training he had a very amusing canvassing style. Complete with a hair pick stuck in his fro and pants that hung almost a foot below his hips, he would slouch and shuffle like any old b-boy, but when he opened his mouth the rap came out deft and slick, like rap.
“They’re going to fire him, or what?” C____ had been on staff, as far as I could tell, as long as anyone. In a group that changed every day, he was one of a handful of people who everyone seemed to know.
“If you don’t make quota a few days in a row, that’s that. Gone. Too bad -- with a different FM I bet he could have made it today…FM’s make a lot of difference that way,” mike said, and I wondered whether my initial reaction to our turf had slowed down our entire crew.
“But to be honest, he was…well, he’d go out there and screw around. He’d just goof off, talk to people, screw around out there.”
Talking to people didn’t sound like obvious goof-offery to me, although it was something I’d already been lightly admonished for. Unless you thought someone was about to give if only you just engaged them a little bit more, you were only supposed to be initiating a conversation or pushing it toward its conclusion.
That crew was finished and getting their things, and Mike went to cash out the FM. I was still training on cash out, learning to do it without checking my progress each step of the way. Each different form of contributions had to be tallied separately – checks were the easiest, credit card slips each had to be signed by the field manager and eventually signed off by the director doing cash-out. Once each canvasser counted their money, the individual sheets had to be totaled and checked, and then each crew’s sheet had to be compiled. Each canvasser had to record the number of credit card donations, the total credit card donations, the number of checks, total checks, the number of cash donations, total cash donations, and other assorted pieces of data like “donations over $157” (we had none) which seemed to be for some sort of filing purpose. Cash itself was the big task, counting each denomination into its own little pile. If something didn’t add up somewhere, the person doing cash out would have to go back and check through each canvasser’s sheet to examine the totals.
Mike came back with the other crew’s forms and cash. He showed it to me. “They say they had bad turf, but look: you can tell from the numbers. they were probably just slack, wasting their time on people who weren’t going to give.”
One of the sheets showed one hundred, and then two fives and a twenty. “This guy obviously got lucky – one hundo, and then nothing. Anybody can trip into a hundred.” I thought about my last-minute hundred – I would have been in equally dire numbers if not for that.
Mike scanned through the rest of the canvassers. The FM had mostly 20s, and a fifty. A third – an observer – had twenty dollars for the whole day. “Choked,” Mike said. “He walked out of here real quick.”
C___’s sheet showed a dozen cash donations; most were fives or tens. There were two ones. “Look at that, each one of those probably could have been higher. He was just slacking.”
Mike nodded over in the direction of the door. Director M_____ was talking to C___, who was shaking his head at whatever M___ was saying. Mike said, “You know, he’s been here forever, he’s burned out. Happens. Used to be able to pull plenty. But if you have slack people like that on board, it spreads.”
He turned his attention back to my forms, and called out a few wrong numbers or missing pieces of data. I apologized for missing the mistake.
“Trust me,” Mike said, “catching it now is not a problem. Don’t let it slip by here, though.” It took me longer than most other crews to cash-out. Most of the rest of the canvassers had filtered out by now; we had to get things cleaned up soon, as there would be a group interview here on the hour.
There was one other FM still checking over his sheet – Josh, who was passing by, asked me to cash him out. I worked over his sheets, trying to get the rhythms down – numbers, totals, averages, there must have been 80 numbers to fill out in the slip. When I was done, I wrapped it up, the FM took off, and I put it in a tattered FedEx envelope and dropped it in the back cubicle.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, a bellow rang out through the office – “WHO CASHED THIS CREW OUT?” I cringed. There was a large man scanning the office, an ornery look in his eyes.
“That was probably me,” I said, trying to laugh it off in advance. He walked over with the wad of slips in his hand. He was a burly, hairy dude, like an burrowing woodland creature, a bit greasy and rounded out by a belly. He wore garish jewelry and there was anonymous trance music blaring from the computer that he’d been sitting at.
“Is that your scribble?” he asked.
I looked, nodded.
“Great! Another moron to make my job harder!”
“OK, ok, Xtian,” Mike said. “It was his first cash out, I had him get some practice.”
“Well, he’s gonna need a lot more of it.” He handed the wad to me, with a red circle where I’d made some error. “After you figure it out, then you’ll count all of it.” He gestured at the piles of envelopes on his desk with bundles of thousands of dollars inside.
“Oh,” I said.
I almost said ‘yes, sir.’
“Just kidding. You think we’d let you touch the money again after you already screwed up? You’ll just get to watch.”
He handed the envelopes to Mike, who patted me on the back.
“Don’t worry, everyone screws up, happens all the time. Except Xtian – he never once makes a mistake, isn’t that right?”
Xtian had already turned and hunched himself over mounds of spreadsheets. The trance music blared away. “You’d better believe it.”
* * *
Mike and I went into the corner behind a makeshift wall and sorted methodically through the envelopes, separating bundles and spreadsheets into an array of piles. So much money, sorting bill by bill, check by check, through more than ten thousand dollars.
“He’s so goddamn grouchy all the time, but what can you say – he tears through all this paperwork,” Mike said. “You’ve never seen anything like Xtian going through piles of paper.”
Mike was already tearing into the packages of money – counting out mounds of 20 bills each, rows and rows of stacks. I later learned that, for the first couple of months, this cash counting table was out in the wide open – anyone who walked in the doors (and we had some pretty sketchy characters walking in to be interviewed for a job) could see the mounds of cash lying about. Though this cubicle situation was an improvement, it wasn’t exactly a vault either.
It took us at least forty-five minutes to count everything. If there was a discrepancy, we’d have to go back and find the error – was it an adding error on the sheet? Did we count wrong? This time around, it all worked out even.
* * *
We walked out of the office and toward Tribeca to go purchase money orders, which would then be sent ‘to Boston.’ I kept eyeing the package under Mike’s arm. I’d certainly never seen that much cash in one place, let alone have it under my care. The bank was only a few blocks away – I counted every step, and watched the alleys.
As we waited on line, Mike said –
“I really didn’t need you to come along, but I figured you could use the break, huh?”
“It gets crazy in there!”
“Tell me about it. Nice thing is, none of them really keep track of how long this takes, so we can get a coffee or whatever. We don’t really have to be back, whatever they say… So how’ve the first few days been?”
“Pretty good. I think I’m getting the hang of it.”
“Well you’ve done pretty well for yourself, right?” I shrugged. “Too bad you don’t bonus,” Mike said. “You’d be feeling even better about it.”
It hadn’t really bothered me much, not bonusing – if anything, I was relieved to not have that kind of pressure going out there. But I’d been thinking about one of the directors, M___ -- he seemed to be taking it to another level. Together with Josh, M___ was one of the main forces in the office, calling most of the shots and being wherever it was that things were getting done. He was a recent graduate of a top-tier school, and he told me once that he’d been offered “crazy money” for some hot law firm, but ended up going with this.
“And what do you know,” he said, “I’m making as good money here as I would at the law firm.” That was kind of incredible to me, but he explained: a trainer who takes out an observer will collect the bonus from the observer (who is unpaid), and if he were to go out and make $800-$1000 – which he regularly was able to do – he could bring home $400 or $500 a day. Those numbers were kind of boggling to come from our campaign.
“It’s kind of strange to think of all the money that goes through here,” I said to Mike as he signed the money order. “I still haven’t wrapped my head around it.”
“Oh, it’s huge,” Mike said. “This is big business here, for sure. Look at all the campaigns out there – Grassroots Campaigns is ahead of all of them, as far as the business goes.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, look,” Mike said. “You’ve got ACT running the huge Get Out the Vote operation – that’s the biggest one. And ACT is mostly funded by Soros. But you also have ACORN, which is basically this umbrella organization for all these Democratic or progressive organizations. So, like, that’s big – it’s huge, you know with campaign finance and the 527s and all that, there’s just all this stuff in the air and no real sense of where the limits are. But they’re all competing with each other, you know, everyone wants to be running the big campaign. Then you have the Democratic National Committee, of course – “
I interrupted him, putting my ignorance in full view. “Wait, Mike…uhh, what is the Democratic National Committee?”
He grinned. “Well, it’s basically the national party structure. But, there’s really not much to it – it’s kind of a big, like, shell. Gutted. They have money and the name, but no structure or anything. Which is why Terry McAuliffe saw Grassroots Campaigns and jumped on it. He just loved the deal, he bought in big time.”
“What deal?”
“Grassroots Campaigns. Basically, Grassroots Campaigns came out of the PIRGs and Telefund and all that” – he said this like I knew what it was – “took their model and used it in a for-profit company. Now, since they’re for-profit, they can shop it around to political organizations. Could have run a campaign for anyone, I guess, but the DNC bought it right away, so Grassroots Campaigns blew up real quick.”
“So, this money that we’re sending in goes to the DNC – “
Mike nodded and finished the sentence “—but Grassroots Campaigns itself is being paid for the whole operation.”
“Huh,” I said as we rounded the corner and stopped in to get some coffee. My feet hurt from canvassing, and we still had another five or six hours of the day left. There was another question that had been bothering me. “We’re all being ‘trained’ right now for MoveOn. Isn’t it illegal for MoveOn and the Democratic National Committee to be – “
“Yes, but technically Grassroots Campaigns is just contracted by each of them, separately. I don’t know the deal with the MoveOn thing, nobody seems to know, but I’m sure they’ve figured out some way to make it legal. Or, legal enough.”
“Either way, this means that the money that we’re raising out there isn’t going to our Get Out Vote Campaign, right? The money goes one way, we go the other, never the twain shall meet.”
Mike sipped his coffee. “Yeah, but isn’t it semantics, really? We’re raising money for ‘the campaign.’ That’s all you need to know, all you need to say.”
* * *
By the time Mike and I got back an interview session had already come and gone. The PM crew soon came in – a second crew of canvassers, somewhat smaller than the AM shift, the PM crew would go out at 2 and come back at 8, just before dark. I didn’t recognize anybody in the PM crew, and somehow this made cash out easier – I cashed out two crews, still slow, but steadier. It required a bit of focus – to drown out the chatter, the “Get Low”, the walls swimming with loud posters, and to just focus on the numbers. A simple grid of numbers, and the corresponding units of currency. “Not so bad,” I told myself, although I dropped the envelopes at Xtians desk as if they contained some explosive material.
Cashout seemed at first glance like a disorderly, even chaotic process. Everyone pulled up metal chairs, or sat right there on the floor, and counted the money out into loose piles. As they did so, the stereo blasted music – usually, Lil John’s “Get Low” – and traded stories from out there on the street.
“I talked to this guy for twenty minutes, and he said he would go right to the ATM. I figured, nah forget about it, but he came back! I couldn’t believe it – hundred bucks cash.”
“I got fifty from a Republican!”
“This guy tried to, like, grab me. I screamed and a cop actually saw it. Thank God, what a creep! I’m like, hello.”
The canvassers that weren’t talking were paying close attention to each entry. Every donation needed to be transcribed again on another sheet, including the donor’s address, phone number, email, currency form and amount. For those who had a good amount of donors, this could take a long time. Brows furrowed, pens chewed. People trying to descramble signature scrawl, make out scribbled addresses; others relived each transaction aloud as they went through their piles – people who they talked to for fifteen minutes and gave five bucks; improbable hundos; strange occupations, like ‘futurologist.’ Those who had pulled in big sat with their chests pumped up; those who hadn’t slumped in their chair, looking as if they had spent a good bit of their six hours out there running. Directors roamed the seated crowd, helping to cash out, chatting people up, assessing the take.
Mike came over as I was checking the sums of my crew. He asked how I did – “So so. Better than those guys,” I said, nodding in the direction of the crew that had come in just before us. There were loud complaints coming from them. Whenever anyone approached them, there would be a comment about how the street they had been sent to was “busted turf.”
“Yeah, well,” he said like talking about a misbehaving child, “turf, especially in Manhattan, can never really be busted. There’s hardly a street on this island where you can’t make quota if you know what you’re doing.” Director M____ had walked over and taken the FM aside to talk. Mike nodded at them, “I think that’s probably it for C____. He was on probation already, and he only brought in 120 today.”
C____ was one of the few non-whites working in the office. I didn’t know him, but he seemed pretty well-liked by everyone, and from what I’d seen in training he had a very amusing canvassing style. Complete with a hair pick stuck in his fro and pants that hung almost a foot below his hips, he would slouch and shuffle like any old b-boy, but when he opened his mouth the rap came out deft and slick, like rap.
“They’re going to fire him, or what?” C____ had been on staff, as far as I could tell, as long as anyone. In a group that changed every day, he was one of a handful of people who everyone seemed to know.
“If you don’t make quota a few days in a row, that’s that. Gone. Too bad -- with a different FM I bet he could have made it today…FM’s make a lot of difference that way,” mike said, and I wondered whether my initial reaction to our turf had slowed down our entire crew.
“But to be honest, he was…well, he’d go out there and screw around. He’d just goof off, talk to people, screw around out there.”
Talking to people didn’t sound like obvious goof-offery to me, although it was something I’d already been lightly admonished for. Unless you thought someone was about to give if only you just engaged them a little bit more, you were only supposed to be initiating a conversation or pushing it toward its conclusion.
That crew was finished and getting their things, and Mike went to cash out the FM. I was still training on cash out, learning to do it without checking my progress each step of the way. Each different form of contributions had to be tallied separately – checks were the easiest, credit card slips each had to be signed by the field manager and eventually signed off by the director doing cash-out. Once each canvasser counted their money, the individual sheets had to be totaled and checked, and then each crew’s sheet had to be compiled. Each canvasser had to record the number of credit card donations, the total credit card donations, the number of checks, total checks, the number of cash donations, total cash donations, and other assorted pieces of data like “donations over $157” (we had none) which seemed to be for some sort of filing purpose. Cash itself was the big task, counting each denomination into its own little pile. If something didn’t add up somewhere, the person doing cash out would have to go back and check through each canvasser’s sheet to examine the totals.
Mike came back with the other crew’s forms and cash. He showed it to me. “They say they had bad turf, but look: you can tell from the numbers. they were probably just slack, wasting their time on people who weren’t going to give.”
One of the sheets showed one hundred, and then two fives and a twenty. “This guy obviously got lucky – one hundo, and then nothing. Anybody can trip into a hundred.” I thought about my last-minute hundred – I would have been in equally dire numbers if not for that.
Mike scanned through the rest of the canvassers. The FM had mostly 20s, and a fifty. A third – an observer – had twenty dollars for the whole day. “Choked,” Mike said. “He walked out of here real quick.”
C___’s sheet showed a dozen cash donations; most were fives or tens. There were two ones. “Look at that, each one of those probably could have been higher. He was just slacking.”
Mike nodded over in the direction of the door. Director M_____ was talking to C___, who was shaking his head at whatever M___ was saying. Mike said, “You know, he’s been here forever, he’s burned out. Happens. Used to be able to pull plenty. But if you have slack people like that on board, it spreads.”
He turned his attention back to my forms, and called out a few wrong numbers or missing pieces of data. I apologized for missing the mistake.
“Trust me,” Mike said, “catching it now is not a problem. Don’t let it slip by here, though.” It took me longer than most other crews to cash-out. Most of the rest of the canvassers had filtered out by now; we had to get things cleaned up soon, as there would be a group interview here on the hour.
There was one other FM still checking over his sheet – Josh, who was passing by, asked me to cash him out. I worked over his sheets, trying to get the rhythms down – numbers, totals, averages, there must have been 80 numbers to fill out in the slip. When I was done, I wrapped it up, the FM took off, and I put it in a tattered FedEx envelope and dropped it in the back cubicle.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, a bellow rang out through the office – “WHO CASHED THIS CREW OUT?” I cringed. There was a large man scanning the office, an ornery look in his eyes.
“That was probably me,” I said, trying to laugh it off in advance. He walked over with the wad of slips in his hand. He was a burly, hairy dude, like an burrowing woodland creature, a bit greasy and rounded out by a belly. He wore garish jewelry and there was anonymous trance music blaring from the computer that he’d been sitting at.
“Is that your scribble?” he asked.
I looked, nodded.
“Great! Another moron to make my job harder!”
“OK, ok, Xtian,” Mike said. “It was his first cash out, I had him get some practice.”
“Well, he’s gonna need a lot more of it.” He handed the wad to me, with a red circle where I’d made some error. “After you figure it out, then you’ll count all of it.” He gestured at the piles of envelopes on his desk with bundles of thousands of dollars inside.
“Oh,” I said.
I almost said ‘yes, sir.’
“Just kidding. You think we’d let you touch the money again after you already screwed up? You’ll just get to watch.”
He handed the envelopes to Mike, who patted me on the back.
“Don’t worry, everyone screws up, happens all the time. Except Xtian – he never once makes a mistake, isn’t that right?”
Xtian had already turned and hunched himself over mounds of spreadsheets. The trance music blared away. “You’d better believe it.”
* * *
Mike and I went into the corner behind a makeshift wall and sorted methodically through the envelopes, separating bundles and spreadsheets into an array of piles. So much money, sorting bill by bill, check by check, through more than ten thousand dollars.
“He’s so goddamn grouchy all the time, but what can you say – he tears through all this paperwork,” Mike said. “You’ve never seen anything like Xtian going through piles of paper.”
Mike was already tearing into the packages of money – counting out mounds of 20 bills each, rows and rows of stacks. I later learned that, for the first couple of months, this cash counting table was out in the wide open – anyone who walked in the doors (and we had some pretty sketchy characters walking in to be interviewed for a job) could see the mounds of cash lying about. Though this cubicle situation was an improvement, it wasn’t exactly a vault either.
It took us at least forty-five minutes to count everything. If there was a discrepancy, we’d have to go back and find the error – was it an adding error on the sheet? Did we count wrong? This time around, it all worked out even.
* * *
We walked out of the office and toward Tribeca to go purchase money orders, which would then be sent ‘to Boston.’ I kept eyeing the package under Mike’s arm. I’d certainly never seen that much cash in one place, let alone have it under my care. The bank was only a few blocks away – I counted every step, and watched the alleys.
As we waited on line, Mike said –
“I really didn’t need you to come along, but I figured you could use the break, huh?”
“It gets crazy in there!”
“Tell me about it. Nice thing is, none of them really keep track of how long this takes, so we can get a coffee or whatever. We don’t really have to be back, whatever they say… So how’ve the first few days been?”
“Pretty good. I think I’m getting the hang of it.”
“Well you’ve done pretty well for yourself, right?” I shrugged. “Too bad you don’t bonus,” Mike said. “You’d be feeling even better about it.”
It hadn’t really bothered me much, not bonusing – if anything, I was relieved to not have that kind of pressure going out there. But I’d been thinking about one of the directors, M___ -- he seemed to be taking it to another level. Together with Josh, M___ was one of the main forces in the office, calling most of the shots and being wherever it was that things were getting done. He was a recent graduate of a top-tier school, and he told me once that he’d been offered “crazy money” for some hot law firm, but ended up going with this.
“And what do you know,” he said, “I’m making as good money here as I would at the law firm.” That was kind of incredible to me, but he explained: a trainer who takes out an observer will collect the bonus from the observer (who is unpaid), and if he were to go out and make $800-$1000 – which he regularly was able to do – he could bring home $400 or $500 a day. Those numbers were kind of boggling to come from our campaign.
“It’s kind of strange to think of all the money that goes through here,” I said to Mike as he signed the money order. “I still haven’t wrapped my head around it.”
“Oh, it’s huge,” Mike said. “This is big business here, for sure. Look at all the campaigns out there – Grassroots Campaigns is ahead of all of them, as far as the business goes.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, look,” Mike said. “You’ve got ACT running the huge Get Out the Vote operation – that’s the biggest one. And ACT is mostly funded by Soros. But you also have ACORN, which is basically this umbrella organization for all these Democratic or progressive organizations. So, like, that’s big – it’s huge, you know with campaign finance and the 527s and all that, there’s just all this stuff in the air and no real sense of where the limits are. But they’re all competing with each other, you know, everyone wants to be running the big campaign. Then you have the Democratic National Committee, of course – “
I interrupted him, putting my ignorance in full view. “Wait, Mike…uhh, what is the Democratic National Committee?”
He grinned. “Well, it’s basically the national party structure. But, there’s really not much to it – it’s kind of a big, like, shell. Gutted. They have money and the name, but no structure or anything. Which is why Terry McAuliffe saw Grassroots Campaigns and jumped on it. He just loved the deal, he bought in big time.”
“What deal?”
“Grassroots Campaigns. Basically, Grassroots Campaigns came out of the PIRGs and Telefund and all that” – he said this like I knew what it was – “took their model and used it in a for-profit company. Now, since they’re for-profit, they can shop it around to political organizations. Could have run a campaign for anyone, I guess, but the DNC bought it right away, so Grassroots Campaigns blew up real quick.”
“So, this money that we’re sending in goes to the DNC – “
Mike nodded and finished the sentence “—but Grassroots Campaigns itself is being paid for the whole operation.”
“Huh,” I said as we rounded the corner and stopped in to get some coffee. My feet hurt from canvassing, and we still had another five or six hours of the day left. There was another question that had been bothering me. “We’re all being ‘trained’ right now for MoveOn. Isn’t it illegal for MoveOn and the Democratic National Committee to be – “
“Yes, but technically Grassroots Campaigns is just contracted by each of them, separately. I don’t know the deal with the MoveOn thing, nobody seems to know, but I’m sure they’ve figured out some way to make it legal. Or, legal enough.”
“Either way, this means that the money that we’re raising out there isn’t going to our Get Out Vote Campaign, right? The money goes one way, we go the other, never the twain shall meet.”
Mike sipped his coffee. “Yeah, but isn’t it semantics, really? We’re raising money for ‘the campaign.’ That’s all you need to know, all you need to say.”
* * *
By the time Mike and I got back an interview session had already come and gone. The PM crew soon came in – a second crew of canvassers, somewhat smaller than the AM shift, the PM crew would go out at 2 and come back at 8, just before dark. I didn’t recognize anybody in the PM crew, and somehow this made cash out easier – I cashed out two crews, still slow, but steadier. It required a bit of focus – to drown out the chatter, the “Get Low”, the walls swimming with loud posters, and to just focus on the numbers. A simple grid of numbers, and the corresponding units of currency. “Not so bad,” I told myself, although I dropped the envelopes at Xtians desk as if they contained some explosive material.
posted by Greg Bloom at 6/01/2005 11:31:00 PM
Setting out, Lispenard
The crews set out from Lispenard, fanning out to a dozen points around the city. As we walked, I sized up my crew. they were not All Stars. I had a man in his fifties, who had been around for a month or so longer than I had, and about whom I had overheard the directors talking about in the morning meeting (they concluded that he was ‘inconsistent’); a new AD, on his first day; a college kid with tattered cargo shorts on; a fifty-something woman who somehow resembled a poodle with red-dyed hair.
It’s not until the minute we turned the corner that the blue of our shirts, the tacky glossy DNC logo and the angle at which everyone held their clipboards caught my attention. We were suddenly in the thick of Chinatown – surrounded by tchotchkes and cheap handbag knockoffs and the unceasing hordes of people who come to New York City for that kind of thing. The most obscene mob in the city. Our DNC shirts are bright blue and made us stick out like a waddling line of ducks as we walked through the stinking, jammed market. We moved as a unit, weaving through the crowd.
By the time we were on the subway, I had said at least a few words to each crew member. The group started reading over their raps and my older guy started talking loudly about how much money he made yesterday, how much money he’ll make today (“I did $250 yesterday, it was ok, but I’m doing five today.” “Alright!” the college kid nodded him on, irony free.) The awkwardness of a moment before already began to fade; our shirts were badges and my clipboard felt like a hammer. I lock eyes with almost every person on the subway as each crew member calls aloud their projected goal for the day: That’s right. We’re doing this. What can you say for yourself?
It’s not until the minute we turned the corner that the blue of our shirts, the tacky glossy DNC logo and the angle at which everyone held their clipboards caught my attention. We were suddenly in the thick of Chinatown – surrounded by tchotchkes and cheap handbag knockoffs and the unceasing hordes of people who come to New York City for that kind of thing. The most obscene mob in the city. Our DNC shirts are bright blue and made us stick out like a waddling line of ducks as we walked through the stinking, jammed market. We moved as a unit, weaving through the crowd.
By the time we were on the subway, I had said at least a few words to each crew member. The group started reading over their raps and my older guy started talking loudly about how much money he made yesterday, how much money he’ll make today (“I did $250 yesterday, it was ok, but I’m doing five today.” “Alright!” the college kid nodded him on, irony free.) The awkwardness of a moment before already began to fade; our shirts were badges and my clipboard felt like a hammer. I lock eyes with almost every person on the subway as each crew member calls aloud their projected goal for the day: That’s right. We’re doing this. What can you say for yourself?
posted by Greg Bloom at 6/01/2005 11:28:00 PM
Door vs Street
A knock on someone’s door is itself a conventional social action – someone announces their calling and the choice is left up to the home owner as to whether he or she will answer. It is a civilized broach of discourse, even when unwelcome.
To approach someone on the street is to begin an interaction by an act of impropriety. People don’t talk to other people on the street, unless it’s to say “watch where you’re going, mister!” or “Look out! Falling safe!” or “please sir can I have fifty cents” or “hands up and give me your goddamn wallet.” While canvassing, you are offering forth a new reason to be approaching someone on the street:
HEY! This is IMPORTANT, and I need YOUR help to do it!
There’s no pretense to propriety or politeness. Accordingly, while knocking on someone’s door will usually result at worst in the door itself being returned to your face, interrupting someone’s walk down the street will more often result in lashing, snarling rudeness, magnified by the anonymity and the publicness of the exchange.
Mark would have done fine on street as well, if for no other reason than he knows a bit about how to be an MC, and understands how to work a crowd. You’re not addressing individuals like you would at someone’s door. There’s only the swarm, the rush, the unending flow of people who come from anywhere and who are on their way to somewhere else – anonymous baseless moving units. Units that you must intercept. In order to be able to do that, you have to believe not only in your Cause, but you have to believe that each and every person that passes you shares in that Cause and supports your mission. And you have to be able to forget just as quickly when they don’t.
Fortunately, our Cause was pretty goddamn tantamount. Occasionally we would walk past canvassers for Save the Children and mutter under our breath about them – they’re just cluttering up the streets and they’re weak, and anyway can’t those goddamn children just cool it for a couple of months? We’ve got an election to win.
To approach someone on the street is to begin an interaction by an act of impropriety. People don’t talk to other people on the street, unless it’s to say “watch where you’re going, mister!” or “Look out! Falling safe!” or “please sir can I have fifty cents” or “hands up and give me your goddamn wallet.” While canvassing, you are offering forth a new reason to be approaching someone on the street:
HEY! This is IMPORTANT, and I need YOUR help to do it!
There’s no pretense to propriety or politeness. Accordingly, while knocking on someone’s door will usually result at worst in the door itself being returned to your face, interrupting someone’s walk down the street will more often result in lashing, snarling rudeness, magnified by the anonymity and the publicness of the exchange.
Mark would have done fine on street as well, if for no other reason than he knows a bit about how to be an MC, and understands how to work a crowd. You’re not addressing individuals like you would at someone’s door. There’s only the swarm, the rush, the unending flow of people who come from anywhere and who are on their way to somewhere else – anonymous baseless moving units. Units that you must intercept. In order to be able to do that, you have to believe not only in your Cause, but you have to believe that each and every person that passes you shares in that Cause and supports your mission. And you have to be able to forget just as quickly when they don’t.
Fortunately, our Cause was pretty goddamn tantamount. Occasionally we would walk past canvassers for Save the Children and mutter under our breath about them – they’re just cluttering up the streets and they’re weak, and anyway can’t those goddamn children just cool it for a couple of months? We’ve got an election to win.
posted by Greg Bloom at 6/01/2005 11:25:00 PM
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Knock knock
I didn’t experience door canvassing until Miami, and even then I barely had a brush with it, so instead I will quote here from Mark’s blog. Mark was canvassing doors in DC, taking off with a van full of canvassers each day and dropping them at key points in the posh suburbs. (He was much more on top of the ball than I was, and wrote about this stuff as it was happening. What an idea.)
Some choice excerpts:
Today happened to be my first day canvassing completely by myself. I went door to door in a neighborhood on the Potomac in Alexandria. I either got a door quickly shut in my face with the words "Wrong house. We're Republican." Or I was offered lemonade, ice-cold water, or leftover lasagna.
…
The highlight of the day was a first grader who ran upstairs while I was talking to his father, and came back down with some of the contents of his piggy bank. He wished me luck getting a new president and handed me various coinage. I told him to try and pretend he was 18 this November and sneak in to the polls….
* * *
I met a man today who said he works on the road construction outside of Pennsylvania Ave. Everybody in his union dislikes President Bush, so they've taken an absurd amount of time to complete the roadwork on purpose. In fact, he claims that his unit has "inadvertently" cut off the power and water supplies to the White House while drilling on two separate occasions. I'm not sure if he was lying or not. When he shook my hand, he held it with confidence and looked me in the eyes with promise. He believed in me, which made me believe in him and his word. Even if his words did involve federal sabotage crimes.
I have been practicing my Spanish while going door to door. I have learned that latinos who are in the process of becoming citizens are more excited about their ability to participate in this government than people who actually have a vote. This makes me really optimistic and angry at the same time. I guess I'll write more later once I've had the opportunity to digest the importance of certain macro-political movements.
* * *
I find myself explaining democracy to a lot of small children. A 6 year old boy enthusiastically asked me today if a presidential election involves a swordfight. I regrettfully informed him that it did not. I contemplated explaining the historical significance of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, but I didn't want to get his hopes up.
He didn't think voting sounded very exciting, so I told him that he might be able to punch his ballot with a sword. Any sentence that involves the word "punch" and "sword" tend to ignite interest in hyperactive-agressive 6 year old dudes.
I meet people from both ends of the age spectrum.
Ruth opened the front door, and said through the screened one "I don't know what you're selling, but boy, I'm buying. Look at your smile!". It made me smile bigger, and blush.
She insisted that I must be the same age of her high school graduate grandson, but I informed that I had actually just graduated from college. She thought that I was a boy genius of no more than 18 years of age, like her grandson, and had simply breezed through college in an accelerated program. I had to tell her that I was, in fact, 22. I told her not to be fooled by the smile, and that I shaved that morning, which makes me look more pubescent.
She continued to talk, for nearly 30 mins. about her grandsons, and her knees, and her porch. Eventually, she stopped herself and said, "I guess none of this has anything to do with presidents and whatnot". I told her that it was ok. Eventually she gave a contribution after I told her that the reason I came door to door was to bring politics back to the people and to make sure the government listens to people's needs. If by "people's needs" they mean "80 year old women's physical therapy schedule", then I feel like I've fulfilled my civic duty. I would have rather talked about swordfights though, to be honest.
Some choice excerpts:
Today happened to be my first day canvassing completely by myself. I went door to door in a neighborhood on the Potomac in Alexandria. I either got a door quickly shut in my face with the words "Wrong house. We're Republican." Or I was offered lemonade, ice-cold water, or leftover lasagna.
…
The highlight of the day was a first grader who ran upstairs while I was talking to his father, and came back down with some of the contents of his piggy bank. He wished me luck getting a new president and handed me various coinage. I told him to try and pretend he was 18 this November and sneak in to the polls….
* * *
I met a man today who said he works on the road construction outside of Pennsylvania Ave. Everybody in his union dislikes President Bush, so they've taken an absurd amount of time to complete the roadwork on purpose. In fact, he claims that his unit has "inadvertently" cut off the power and water supplies to the White House while drilling on two separate occasions. I'm not sure if he was lying or not. When he shook my hand, he held it with confidence and looked me in the eyes with promise. He believed in me, which made me believe in him and his word. Even if his words did involve federal sabotage crimes.
I have been practicing my Spanish while going door to door. I have learned that latinos who are in the process of becoming citizens are more excited about their ability to participate in this government than people who actually have a vote. This makes me really optimistic and angry at the same time. I guess I'll write more later once I've had the opportunity to digest the importance of certain macro-political movements.
* * *
I find myself explaining democracy to a lot of small children. A 6 year old boy enthusiastically asked me today if a presidential election involves a swordfight. I regrettfully informed him that it did not. I contemplated explaining the historical significance of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, but I didn't want to get his hopes up.
He didn't think voting sounded very exciting, so I told him that he might be able to punch his ballot with a sword. Any sentence that involves the word "punch" and "sword" tend to ignite interest in hyperactive-agressive 6 year old dudes.
I meet people from both ends of the age spectrum.
Ruth opened the front door, and said through the screened one "I don't know what you're selling, but boy, I'm buying. Look at your smile!". It made me smile bigger, and blush.
She insisted that I must be the same age of her high school graduate grandson, but I informed that I had actually just graduated from college. She thought that I was a boy genius of no more than 18 years of age, like her grandson, and had simply breezed through college in an accelerated program. I had to tell her that I was, in fact, 22. I told her not to be fooled by the smile, and that I shaved that morning, which makes me look more pubescent.
She continued to talk, for nearly 30 mins. about her grandsons, and her knees, and her porch. Eventually, she stopped herself and said, "I guess none of this has anything to do with presidents and whatnot". I told her that it was ok. Eventually she gave a contribution after I told her that the reason I came door to door was to bring politics back to the people and to make sure the government listens to people's needs. If by "people's needs" they mean "80 year old women's physical therapy schedule", then I feel like I've fulfilled my civic duty. I would have rather talked about swordfights though, to be honest.
posted by Greg Bloom at 5/24/2005 12:51:00 AM
As it draws close to 10AM, the groups assemble together. Time for announcements. Everyone huddles together in their stinky DNC t-shirts, and a director stands up in a chair in front of them. He starts to read off the days’ items:
“People, some of our staff has been treating the first hour as if it is optional. It really isn’t. You’ll have to be showing up promptly on time. I don’t want anyone straggling in here just before we set out for the day. If we have to, we’ll start sign-ins.”
“Please fill out your contribution forms more legibly. I have here the winner of yesterday’s bad handwriting award – J____!” The director held up a sheet with a cramped, haphazard scrawl across the lines. J____’s friends laughed, and he thanked us all for the honor.
J___ said, smirking, “I’m just trying to make as much money as possible, sir. I don’t have time to worry about making it pretty.”
The director grinned but shook his head. “Worry about it, Boston gets these and I get called up and yelled at. This is not just scribble sheets, it’s important paperwork, people – you have to make sure the paper works.”
“Also, this is very important: do not tell people that the money you are raising goes to a special fund; that is not true. There is no ‘special fund’ that money we raise on the street goes to.” There is some muttering among the crowd; the ‘special fund’ had been even offered to me as a tactic, one of just a handful of responses we had to convince people to give to us on the street. People should give to us, I said in a number of encounters, because the money we raise goes to a separate fund earmarked specially for the swing states. Apparently not, though. “We are ‘raising money to help get the word out about Bush’s record and get John Kerry and other Democrats into office this November.’ That is all.”
“OK, now let’s talk numbers!” The director read from a slip of paper with some scrawl on it. “Our average is $289 a canvasser, still lower than Berkeley, although we’re still bringing in the most in the nation. $12000 yesterday – let’s hear it!” The crowd cheered. “Alright, but people… let’s beat Berkeley today.” Louder cheers.
“Alright, now time for our personals—Maceo, speak up. Why did you take this job?”
Maceo is a mocha-skinned thickly-curled doe-eyed creature who wants to be a rock star and has every bit the looks for it, or something soft that passes for it. He didn’t go to college, to his family’s dismay. He tells me later that he is working on his demo, and this is paying the meantime bills. His best neighborhoods are college areas, where he just snags 20 after 20 from college girls all day. And Chelsea—he kills in Chelsea.
“I took this job because no matter what’s going on in my life right now, the threat posed by George Bush and his cronies is just too big to ignore. I’m doing this to do my part and make sure he gets a one-way ticket back to Crawford Texas. As Rage Against the Machine says, ‘What better place than here, what better time than now?’”
People clap and whistle and nobody seems to notice that this is the first time in history that anyone has ever quoted Rage Against the Machine while wearing a Democratic National Committee shirt.
* * *
A girl director took his place on the chair, addressing the crowd. “Ok, now for your daily news briefing.” She read from a sheet of notes in front of her.
On the news front: Bush is really bad. [sorry, I’ll have to go back and find out what was going on around then. But later. Right now I don’t have the strength.]
The first speaker stood up to give the motivational speech again. Having caught the gist of these pep talks, I took the chance to sneak off and go get ready. I walked over to the ‘office’ part of the office, where I smeared on some sunblock on and changed into my shirt, which Blake had washed for me the day before. Josh and Mike were at the front table with JT, who has his tablet computer with him as always. They hunched over the attendance sheet, filling out lists together, assigning street names to each. Josh called me over.
“You’re going to FM today, ok?” FM meant Field Manager – this was my fourth day on the job and I’d be getting my own crew.
“I guess. What do I do?”
“Just take em out, talk em through it, make sure no one gets in a fight or wanders off; when you come back here, you’ll cash everyone out.”
Josh gave me my crew slip, with four names written on the left end – the sheet was a blank grid, where the day’s results were to be filled in.
I walked back over to the huddle, where the director was finishing the pep talk. People were into it, nodding along and getting excited. The director jumped off the chair, saying “Ok, let’s do this loud and scare the crap out of Door.” The Door squads were at the other end of their office, also in a huddle. “Hands in everyone. Here and now, on three! One, two, three!”
“HERE AND NOW!”
* * *
The Door squad looked up for a second, didn't catch the reference apparently, then popped back into their huddle. We heard their count-off, and then:
“DOWN HERE IT’S OUR WORLD!”
Door. Their Canvass Director had some Goonies fixation. Nice kids, kinda preppy though. I was glad to be on Street – we were a real hodgepodge crew.
“People, some of our staff has been treating the first hour as if it is optional. It really isn’t. You’ll have to be showing up promptly on time. I don’t want anyone straggling in here just before we set out for the day. If we have to, we’ll start sign-ins.”
“Please fill out your contribution forms more legibly. I have here the winner of yesterday’s bad handwriting award – J____!” The director held up a sheet with a cramped, haphazard scrawl across the lines. J____’s friends laughed, and he thanked us all for the honor.
J___ said, smirking, “I’m just trying to make as much money as possible, sir. I don’t have time to worry about making it pretty.”
The director grinned but shook his head. “Worry about it, Boston gets these and I get called up and yelled at. This is not just scribble sheets, it’s important paperwork, people – you have to make sure the paper works.”
“Also, this is very important: do not tell people that the money you are raising goes to a special fund; that is not true. There is no ‘special fund’ that money we raise on the street goes to.” There is some muttering among the crowd; the ‘special fund’ had been even offered to me as a tactic, one of just a handful of responses we had to convince people to give to us on the street. People should give to us, I said in a number of encounters, because the money we raise goes to a separate fund earmarked specially for the swing states. Apparently not, though. “We are ‘raising money to help get the word out about Bush’s record and get John Kerry and other Democrats into office this November.’ That is all.”
“OK, now let’s talk numbers!” The director read from a slip of paper with some scrawl on it. “Our average is $289 a canvasser, still lower than Berkeley, although we’re still bringing in the most in the nation. $12000 yesterday – let’s hear it!” The crowd cheered. “Alright, but people… let’s beat Berkeley today.” Louder cheers.
“Alright, now time for our personals—Maceo, speak up. Why did you take this job?”
Maceo is a mocha-skinned thickly-curled doe-eyed creature who wants to be a rock star and has every bit the looks for it, or something soft that passes for it. He didn’t go to college, to his family’s dismay. He tells me later that he is working on his demo, and this is paying the meantime bills. His best neighborhoods are college areas, where he just snags 20 after 20 from college girls all day. And Chelsea—he kills in Chelsea.
“I took this job because no matter what’s going on in my life right now, the threat posed by George Bush and his cronies is just too big to ignore. I’m doing this to do my part and make sure he gets a one-way ticket back to Crawford Texas. As Rage Against the Machine says, ‘What better place than here, what better time than now?’”
People clap and whistle and nobody seems to notice that this is the first time in history that anyone has ever quoted Rage Against the Machine while wearing a Democratic National Committee shirt.
* * *
A girl director took his place on the chair, addressing the crowd. “Ok, now for your daily news briefing.” She read from a sheet of notes in front of her.
On the news front: Bush is really bad. [sorry, I’ll have to go back and find out what was going on around then. But later. Right now I don’t have the strength.]
The first speaker stood up to give the motivational speech again. Having caught the gist of these pep talks, I took the chance to sneak off and go get ready. I walked over to the ‘office’ part of the office, where I smeared on some sunblock on and changed into my shirt, which Blake had washed for me the day before. Josh and Mike were at the front table with JT, who has his tablet computer with him as always. They hunched over the attendance sheet, filling out lists together, assigning street names to each. Josh called me over.
“You’re going to FM today, ok?” FM meant Field Manager – this was my fourth day on the job and I’d be getting my own crew.
“I guess. What do I do?”
“Just take em out, talk em through it, make sure no one gets in a fight or wanders off; when you come back here, you’ll cash everyone out.”
Josh gave me my crew slip, with four names written on the left end – the sheet was a blank grid, where the day’s results were to be filled in.
I walked back over to the huddle, where the director was finishing the pep talk. People were into it, nodding along and getting excited. The director jumped off the chair, saying “Ok, let’s do this loud and scare the crap out of Door.” The Door squads were at the other end of their office, also in a huddle. “Hands in everyone. Here and now, on three! One, two, three!”
“HERE AND NOW!”
* * *
The Door squad looked up for a second, didn't catch the reference apparently, then popped back into their huddle. We heard their count-off, and then:
“DOWN HERE IT’S OUR WORLD!”
Door. Their Canvass Director had some Goonies fixation. Nice kids, kinda preppy though. I was glad to be on Street – we were a real hodgepodge crew.
posted by Greg Bloom at 5/24/2005 12:45:00 AM
Eye of the tiger. baby
Hi, do you want to help us elect John Kerry today?
The greeting booms out through the room. The greeter stands inside of a circle of a dozen people walking around and around. He calls out to every third or fourth person.
Hi, do you want to help us elect John Kerry today?
The people in the circle smirk, feeling a bit silly. They play along, though, shooting glib responses back at the caller.
Hi, do you want to help us elect John Kerry?
“John Kerry? Not a chance!”
Hi, do you want to help elect Kerry?
“Not today.”
Hi, do you want to help us elect Kerry today?
“Thanks, I’m all set.”
I’ve been instructed to check out the trainings. Strange echoes come from farther down the room, where a second circle of people is gathered. This circle is static. A girl turns her head, giggling, and says to the guy left of her:
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
He nods at her, turns to his left, and asks the next person:
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
The heads keep turning down the chain, passing the question like a baton.
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
Duck, duck, goose. The circle continues its domino mantra as I walk by – Josh, standing at its far edge, nods at me.
A third group is in the other corner, but this one is rather small and quiet – only a couple of people and a director. They are practicing with their clipboards; the director is talking about the order of clipboard materials. They practice flipping back and forth between the front page and the credit card payment slips. Don’t break the rhythm to find the form, be able to bust it right out in their face.
I walk back to the rotating circle, which is still larger now, having absorbed stray staffers who saw some fun and joined in. A different greeter is in the center, and is trying not to be flustered by what is now a walking barrage of jokes.
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush today?
“Viva Boosh!”
Want to help us elect Kerry?
“Get a job!”
This last one gets the biggest laughs from the circle. The guy who says it gets high-fived from the person in front of him.
* * *
There are a few other groups doing other kinds of practice drills. During this first hour of the day, all canvassers are supposed to be training. There are four different kinds of canvassers: “observers” (those on their first day, unpaid for their labor), “T1” and “T2”s (those on their second and third day), plain old “staff,” and the directors. Observers are in the static circle, just practicing the greeting; T1s are in the walking circle, joined by various staffers of good humor – T1s are practicing speaking loud and clear, projecting, anything to get people to stop.
The group in the corner, the T2s practicing with their clipboards, is small for a few reasons. First of all, “training” is over as soon as a canvasser makes above quota – which is around $200 right now. One or two canvassers out of each group will do this on their Observer day; the majority of trainees will make quota by the end of their first training day. The T2s are on their third attempt.
The second reason this group tends to be small is that each day a few people who signed up for training will be no-shows.
If, after a second day of training, a canvasser still hasn’t made quota, things get blurry. Sometimes, the director who has been training him or her will believe that another day might be needed to get the hang of it. Usually, though, after three days it’s clear who is cut out for the job.
On the day that a trainee makes quota, they are invited on as staff. They are given a contract and tax forms, and the pay scale is explained once again – if you clear quota, you get “$300 a week plus 30% of whatever you make above quota. If you don't make quota, you make $50 a day or 30% of whatever you did make, whichever is bigger.” [I had to check that with someone else. It was hard enough to figure it out the first time around, let alone remember it.]
It’s not bad money – if you can handle the work. Less than two percent of the people who call in will make it past the interview, through training, and onto staff.
The greeting booms out through the room. The greeter stands inside of a circle of a dozen people walking around and around. He calls out to every third or fourth person.
Hi, do you want to help us elect John Kerry today?
The people in the circle smirk, feeling a bit silly. They play along, though, shooting glib responses back at the caller.
Hi, do you want to help us elect John Kerry?
“John Kerry? Not a chance!”
Hi, do you want to help elect Kerry?
“Not today.”
Hi, do you want to help us elect Kerry today?
“Thanks, I’m all set.”
I’ve been instructed to check out the trainings. Strange echoes come from farther down the room, where a second circle of people is gathered. This circle is static. A girl turns her head, giggling, and says to the guy left of her:
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
He nods at her, turns to his left, and asks the next person:
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
The heads keep turning down the chain, passing the question like a baton.
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
Duck, duck, goose. The circle continues its domino mantra as I walk by – Josh, standing at its far edge, nods at me.
A third group is in the other corner, but this one is rather small and quiet – only a couple of people and a director. They are practicing with their clipboards; the director is talking about the order of clipboard materials. They practice flipping back and forth between the front page and the credit card payment slips. Don’t break the rhythm to find the form, be able to bust it right out in their face.
I walk back to the rotating circle, which is still larger now, having absorbed stray staffers who saw some fun and joined in. A different greeter is in the center, and is trying not to be flustered by what is now a walking barrage of jokes.
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush today?
“Viva Boosh!”
Want to help us elect Kerry?
“Get a job!”
This last one gets the biggest laughs from the circle. The guy who says it gets high-fived from the person in front of him.
* * *
There are a few other groups doing other kinds of practice drills. During this first hour of the day, all canvassers are supposed to be training. There are four different kinds of canvassers: “observers” (those on their first day, unpaid for their labor), “T1” and “T2”s (those on their second and third day), plain old “staff,” and the directors. Observers are in the static circle, just practicing the greeting; T1s are in the walking circle, joined by various staffers of good humor – T1s are practicing speaking loud and clear, projecting, anything to get people to stop.
The group in the corner, the T2s practicing with their clipboards, is small for a few reasons. First of all, “training” is over as soon as a canvasser makes above quota – which is around $200 right now. One or two canvassers out of each group will do this on their Observer day; the majority of trainees will make quota by the end of their first training day. The T2s are on their third attempt.
The second reason this group tends to be small is that each day a few people who signed up for training will be no-shows.
If, after a second day of training, a canvasser still hasn’t made quota, things get blurry. Sometimes, the director who has been training him or her will believe that another day might be needed to get the hang of it. Usually, though, after three days it’s clear who is cut out for the job.
On the day that a trainee makes quota, they are invited on as staff. They are given a contract and tax forms, and the pay scale is explained once again – if you clear quota, you get “$300 a week plus 30% of whatever you make above quota. If you don't make quota, you make $50 a day or 30% of whatever you did make, whichever is bigger.” [I had to check that with someone else. It was hard enough to figure it out the first time around, let alone remember it.]
It’s not bad money – if you can handle the work. Less than two percent of the people who call in will make it past the interview, through training, and onto staff.
posted by Greg Bloom at 5/24/2005 12:32:00 AM
Interview with Josh, 5/7
I’m trying to remember some basic mistakes I made on that first day – like, turning around to talk to people coming from behind me, or turning around to follow people as they pass by. What are some other common mistakes that people do canvassing?
I made fifteen dollars my first day.
Really?!
Knocking on the door in Portland and having someone after thirty seconds come to the door, and you’re just like hey how you doing, I want to talk to you about something, ‘oh alright,’ versus you have three seconds to stop somebody because you’re in the busiest city in the world. How do you stop somebody and stress that it’s important.
What were you doing wrong?
I was terrible at getting people to stop. I was like ‘hey how you doin,’ almost apologetic – you know. ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ {wimpy voice} There was a general feeling of getting [my] ass kicked. The other people I went out with all did very well. We were in a good location, with a Whole Foods on the west side, so like a perfect spot. Everyone else did well, and I was just like ‘whoa I’m gonna really have to work at this.’
…
I remember having people coming, get the interview and come in for their observation day. How many people really knew what observation day was all about? Wear comfortable shoes, bring a thing of water. People show up they walk up two flights of dingy stairs, we’d yell at them for forty minutes, we’d put our hands in the middle say something, then walk back down the stairs get in a subway going to some place, and then get out on the street and BOOM. There you go. Hope you learned all that!
I immediately think of the woman who sat down on the steps of a building and tried to canvass sitting down. She was overweight and shouldn’t have been canvassing at all, so she just sat down, kinda sad, and called from the steps –
do you want to beat george bush?
I think people figure out pretty quickly if they’re going to be any good at it…
I made fifteen dollars my first day.
Really?!
Knocking on the door in Portland and having someone after thirty seconds come to the door, and you’re just like hey how you doing, I want to talk to you about something, ‘oh alright,’ versus you have three seconds to stop somebody because you’re in the busiest city in the world. How do you stop somebody and stress that it’s important.
What were you doing wrong?
I was terrible at getting people to stop. I was like ‘hey how you doin,’ almost apologetic – you know. ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ {wimpy voice} There was a general feeling of getting [my] ass kicked. The other people I went out with all did very well. We were in a good location, with a Whole Foods on the west side, so like a perfect spot. Everyone else did well, and I was just like ‘whoa I’m gonna really have to work at this.’
…
I remember having people coming, get the interview and come in for their observation day. How many people really knew what observation day was all about? Wear comfortable shoes, bring a thing of water. People show up they walk up two flights of dingy stairs, we’d yell at them for forty minutes, we’d put our hands in the middle say something, then walk back down the stairs get in a subway going to some place, and then get out on the street and BOOM. There you go. Hope you learned all that!
I immediately think of the woman who sat down on the steps of a building and tried to canvass sitting down. She was overweight and shouldn’t have been canvassing at all, so she just sat down, kinda sad, and called from the steps –
do you want to beat george bush?
I think people figure out pretty quickly if they’re going to be any good at it…
posted by Greg Bloom at 5/24/2005 12:30:00 AM
Learning to blog, but I ain't got wings
I finally got it together and responded to a MoveOn email. Filibuster battle today leading on into tomorrow. Godspeed, signature, godspeed.
It was seeing Howard Dean on Meet the Press that snapped me into it. Look at that guy -- talk about leading with the hand you’re dealt. Even as I imagined the flaming disaster that might have been his presidential campaign, I could appreciate the whole attack dog thing. But now, like Al Gore’s post-millenial transformation into a real human, it’s inconsequential; if anything it just adds another body to the pile of screaming yahoos. You know that if this was before the election I would be in front of the TV, cheering on every snide growl out of the Good Doctor’s mug. Even when Dean is deftly deflecting each barbed question back to the talking points (basically, that a single-party rule is ‘bad for America’ – truly, a platform to rally around) I taste a trace of bile in my throat.
Katherine, who has been tending to her own blossoms for the past year or so, seems to be finally allowing some of all this juice to soak in, and the effect is appropriately apocalyptic. I feel the opposite. I hear that they’re going after pbs(link) and the implications hardly register, and don’t really faze. A healthier progressive soul would be quick to decry loudly the fascist machinations of a Republican commission out to ‘balance’ public television. From me: whatever. Even John Bolton is kinda more hilarious than anything else.
Let’s be clear, I don’t think this is the easy way out. No. It's not doubt or self-abnegation; rather, it’s just exhaustion.
I emailed a friend of mine in London on the morning of the British elections. She seemed resigned to his win, more or less, although still nurtured a healthy disgust. It just sounded almost inconsequential, even from her, calling him “bLiar.” One might even be thankful (if one still supports some strange hope for a return to peace and stability) that they DID re-elect him, since his fate is so intertwined with Bush’s, it would be too great a slap in the US face if he was dumped. The die on this one was already cast. (Of course, not everyone agrees that this point should matter, specifically the people who live under him... the Daily Show spliced together a good two minutes of comparative footage from Bush and Blair ‘town halls.’ The Bush town halls adulated, drooled with fawning. The Blair town halls sizzled, echoed with boos, turned his glandular knobs to SPIT.)
***
I went home last week, and grabbed a beer for just an hour with one of my volunteers. She was one of my more reliable ones in the end, largely because she understood the internet and was willing to put aside anything for the job. (Almost anything...the Friday before election she went out on a date, and when I found out I scolded her: "Romance must wait until winter!" She retorted, "What am I, a bear?") She and I would even trade links every morning or so, as we browsed while un-grogging. Now she says that she’s tuned out. “I realized I really needed to do something drastic, or else… I don’t go to the blogs any more, I told all my friends ‘PLEASE stop emailing me all this stuff…I just don’t want to know.’”
The more disturbing visit was to KD. I’ll tell her story later, but for now let’s just say that once I got to Miami, I only tried to swing one vote -- just hers. I don’t know if I was responsible in the end for KD going from undecided to Kerry, but nonetheless her vote was one of a handful of small victories for me. I had told her and her family, as I left their house that one night, that I would return once more after the election, when we could finish our argument. I never went back.
This time home I found I could do it. I even felt bad for not having gone back after the election. But when the argument with her family inevitably started up, this time I found KD switching back.
“You know,” she exclaimed after I said something to her mother about hypocrisy and moral values, “I regret voting for John Kerry! If he was president, nothing would be different, none of this would be fixed, it’s just we would have a weak president who stands for nothing!” The moment has faded, she was already denying anything she had learned. Deny, retreat, uphold. I left her house feeling defeat like I haven’t in months.
Ironically, the Grassroots Campaigns offices are doing just as well these days. Staffs have shrunk to a quarter or less of what they were. But averages are up, sometimes even higher than that brief time before the election that I was on board. People still walk down city streets; some of them still want to help out. The business goes on.
It was seeing Howard Dean on Meet the Press that snapped me into it. Look at that guy -- talk about leading with the hand you’re dealt. Even as I imagined the flaming disaster that might have been his presidential campaign, I could appreciate the whole attack dog thing. But now, like Al Gore’s post-millenial transformation into a real human, it’s inconsequential; if anything it just adds another body to the pile of screaming yahoos. You know that if this was before the election I would be in front of the TV, cheering on every snide growl out of the Good Doctor’s mug. Even when Dean is deftly deflecting each barbed question back to the talking points (basically, that a single-party rule is ‘bad for America’ – truly, a platform to rally around) I taste a trace of bile in my throat.
Katherine, who has been tending to her own blossoms for the past year or so, seems to be finally allowing some of all this juice to soak in, and the effect is appropriately apocalyptic. I feel the opposite. I hear that they’re going after pbs(link) and the implications hardly register, and don’t really faze. A healthier progressive soul would be quick to decry loudly the fascist machinations of a Republican commission out to ‘balance’ public television. From me: whatever. Even John Bolton is kinda more hilarious than anything else.
Let’s be clear, I don’t think this is the easy way out. No. It's not doubt or self-abnegation; rather, it’s just exhaustion.
I emailed a friend of mine in London on the morning of the British elections. She seemed resigned to his win, more or less, although still nurtured a healthy disgust. It just sounded almost inconsequential, even from her, calling him “bLiar.” One might even be thankful (if one still supports some strange hope for a return to peace and stability) that they DID re-elect him, since his fate is so intertwined with Bush’s, it would be too great a slap in the US face if he was dumped. The die on this one was already cast. (Of course, not everyone agrees that this point should matter, specifically the people who live under him... the Daily Show spliced together a good two minutes of comparative footage from Bush and Blair ‘town halls.’ The Bush town halls adulated, drooled with fawning. The Blair town halls sizzled, echoed with boos, turned his glandular knobs to SPIT.)
***
I went home last week, and grabbed a beer for just an hour with one of my volunteers. She was one of my more reliable ones in the end, largely because she understood the internet and was willing to put aside anything for the job. (Almost anything...the Friday before election she went out on a date, and when I found out I scolded her: "Romance must wait until winter!" She retorted, "What am I, a bear?") She and I would even trade links every morning or so, as we browsed while un-grogging. Now she says that she’s tuned out. “I realized I really needed to do something drastic, or else… I don’t go to the blogs any more, I told all my friends ‘PLEASE stop emailing me all this stuff…I just don’t want to know.’”
The more disturbing visit was to KD. I’ll tell her story later, but for now let’s just say that once I got to Miami, I only tried to swing one vote -- just hers. I don’t know if I was responsible in the end for KD going from undecided to Kerry, but nonetheless her vote was one of a handful of small victories for me. I had told her and her family, as I left their house that one night, that I would return once more after the election, when we could finish our argument. I never went back.
This time home I found I could do it. I even felt bad for not having gone back after the election. But when the argument with her family inevitably started up, this time I found KD switching back.
“You know,” she exclaimed after I said something to her mother about hypocrisy and moral values, “I regret voting for John Kerry! If he was president, nothing would be different, none of this would be fixed, it’s just we would have a weak president who stands for nothing!” The moment has faded, she was already denying anything she had learned. Deny, retreat, uphold. I left her house feeling defeat like I haven’t in months.
Ironically, the Grassroots Campaigns offices are doing just as well these days. Staffs have shrunk to a quarter or less of what they were. But averages are up, sometimes even higher than that brief time before the election that I was on board. People still walk down city streets; some of them still want to help out. The business goes on.
posted by Greg Bloom at 5/24/2005 12:24:00 AM
Monday, May 16, 2005
Photo-video
www.hard-light.com/photobooth/
Check it, this is my excuse for not posting this week... hope it's good enough. if you are interested in who made the magic, go to www.hard-light.comhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
Check it, this is my excuse for not posting this week... hope it's good enough. if you are interested in who made the magic, go to www.hard-light.comhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
posted by Greg Bloom at 5/16/2005 12:20:00 AM
Monday, May 09, 2005
A new post, elsewhere
I posted this today as well, but it belongs way back in the prologue and i won't send you digging.
(sorry for all of this higgledy piggledy. Oz? Oz! Help my readers. Help my mom!)
http://beatingbush.blogspot.com/2005/04/can-i-call-you-doug.html
(sorry for all of this higgledy piggledy. Oz? Oz! Help my readers. Help my mom!)
http://beatingbush.blogspot.com/2005/04/can-i-call-you-doug.html
posted by Greg Bloom at 5/09/2005 02:22:00 AM
I guess now is as good a time as any to post these
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040830&s=gogola
http://www.slate.com/id/2107490
http://www.slate.com/id/2107490
posted by Greg Bloom at 5/09/2005 02:20:00 AM
Swinging up the learning curve
The next morning, I watched Josh train some more ‘Observers.’ (Observers is the term for people in their first unpaid day of training.) I noticed the mistakes they made, saw which parts of the process were difficult to grasp right away. There is a big leap between learning to memorize the rap – which I’d seen that several trainees had already done – and being able to take the speech and turn it into something resembling a conversation. Josh had me split off with two of them as they read the parts of the rap to each other and to me. I gave them tips as if I’d been doing this for weeks – and they listened, because for all they knew I had been.
My crew that day went out to canvass in midtown; my canvassing partner was a 16 year old kid, who’d been doing this job for a month already. We straddled a wide stretch of walkway beside a massive financial building with a sleek curve in its side. I found that I preferred the glass slab of the skyscraper to the huddle of the lower buildings in Chelsea – the scale leant itself to motion on the ground. Gestures skyward seemed more appropriate, emboldened by scale. Handing over a clipboard seemed like initiating a business deal – Only 68 days left till the election! – and I was in big business.
The kid had a tough time of it, just barely making quota, but I racked it up that day, scoring three hundos and more than two hundred dollars in smaller cons. We returned as four other crews were straggling back to Lispenard, some with their sweaty blue shirts off and slung over their shoulders.
Josh pointed at me as I walked through the door. I showed him my tick sheet totals, and he shook my hand solemnly. “I knew it. Knew it the minute you walked in here. Good work out there, now we’re learn how make it all work in here.”
My crew that day went out to canvass in midtown; my canvassing partner was a 16 year old kid, who’d been doing this job for a month already. We straddled a wide stretch of walkway beside a massive financial building with a sleek curve in its side. I found that I preferred the glass slab of the skyscraper to the huddle of the lower buildings in Chelsea – the scale leant itself to motion on the ground. Gestures skyward seemed more appropriate, emboldened by scale. Handing over a clipboard seemed like initiating a business deal – Only 68 days left till the election! – and I was in big business.
The kid had a tough time of it, just barely making quota, but I racked it up that day, scoring three hundos and more than two hundred dollars in smaller cons. We returned as four other crews were straggling back to Lispenard, some with their sweaty blue shirts off and slung over their shoulders.
Josh pointed at me as I walked through the door. I showed him my tick sheet totals, and he shook my hand solemnly. “I knew it. Knew it the minute you walked in here. Good work out there, now we’re learn how make it all work in here.”
posted by Greg Bloom at 5/09/2005 02:04:00 AM
Hundo!
When we got back to the office, crews were already spread across it, sitting in chairs or on the floor cross-legged, counting their bills and sorting through forms. Mike showed me how to fill in sheets that tracked how much money I raised, from whom, and in what form of currency. This process, he told me, was called “cash out.” He collected the sorted money and forms from Alan (who had showed up around 3 and came back with less than a hundred dollars) and from the girl (who also had made less than a hundred dollars, and who I would never see again.) He counted it again and let them go. I saw Josh intercept the girl on her way out, and they talked by the front doorway.
“She seemed pretty focused on the money,” I said to Mike, nodding in their direction. “Talked all day about the pay."
“Yeah, well that’s the thing,” he said. “You actually do have to be pretty clear on that stuff here.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I was expecting him to talk about what makes a good canvasser. I was counting out the money slowly – there wasn’t that much of it, compared to some of the canvassers in other crews doling through huge wads.
“Well Grassroots Campaigns, they’re not always…straight. Hell when I took this job they were going to make me take a pay cut – you know how directors who are just starting out aren’t supposed to bonus. Like you, you don’t bonus for the first three weeks you’re on the job. But I’ve already been doing this for months, and if I don’t bonus on what I make out there, I bring in less than I did as a Field Manager.”
“Three weeks – in three weeks we’ll be leaving the office, right?”
“Ha, yeah you’re right. Sucks for you.”
I was still thrilled enough to be getting a salary, and health insurance – health insurance! – that this did not bother me much.
“Yeah,” Mike continued, “Stuff like that happens around here. It’s on both ends, of course – people do this to make money, and they can make good money doing it.” He shrugged. “They’re a business, you know – for-profit.” This was news to me – I’d assumed something, I don’t know, like this was a PAC, or a non-profit. What had Laurie said in the interview? I couldn’t remember.
“But that makes some things work better. Ok, so now you’re going to cash me out. First you count the cash, then you add up the numbers in that sheet, make sure they match the numbers in the other sheet – “ As flipped through the stacks of bills, Josh came up and clapped me on the back.
“How’d he do?” he asked.
“Got a hundo,” Mike said to him.
“Hundo!” Josh bellowed.
“And on a credit card, no less!” Mike said, holding up the form my military friend had signed.
“Nobody gets a credit card on their first day,” Josh told me. “You’re a natural! Laurie, you hear that? ”
I was happy for the praise. I knew, though, that I’d gotten lucky. That hundo was a fluke, and without it I wouldn’t have made quota. But I felt pretty sure that the next day would be much easier than this last.
I finished the stack of money and started adding up the numbers on the sheet – our squad hadn’t done very well at all, but Mike didn’t seem fazed. I mentioned the grandmother who’d given me ten bucks.
“Five kids with her, man. She probably could have used that ten bucks, you know?”
“Probably,” he nodded. “But look at it this way. She will live without it. In the meantime, she now feels like she’s done something—she’s participated. That’s worth more than ten bucks. She’ll take that home with her.” He wrapped up the money in one of the numbers sheets, and dropped it in a tattered FedEx envelope. “And that’s that.”
* * *
The rest of the first day is a blur; I remember standing around awkwardly as a lot of tasks got done in quick succession. I took several opportunities to sit down, unshoe and massage my feet. I filled out contract forms, and health insurance information – health insurance! Around 10:15, Josh let me go. “It’s been a long day, I bet. See you in ten hours.”
* * *
By the time I got home, Blake was already asleep. Her job at the farmer’s markets had her up at 4:30 AM; it was already 11.
There was a packed lunch on the counter – chili. A whole pot of it was in the fridge. Next to the brown lunch bag was a note that said “I love you.”
“She seemed pretty focused on the money,” I said to Mike, nodding in their direction. “Talked all day about the pay."
“Yeah, well that’s the thing,” he said. “You actually do have to be pretty clear on that stuff here.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I was expecting him to talk about what makes a good canvasser. I was counting out the money slowly – there wasn’t that much of it, compared to some of the canvassers in other crews doling through huge wads.
“Well Grassroots Campaigns, they’re not always…straight. Hell when I took this job they were going to make me take a pay cut – you know how directors who are just starting out aren’t supposed to bonus. Like you, you don’t bonus for the first three weeks you’re on the job. But I’ve already been doing this for months, and if I don’t bonus on what I make out there, I bring in less than I did as a Field Manager.”
“Three weeks – in three weeks we’ll be leaving the office, right?”
“Ha, yeah you’re right. Sucks for you.”
I was still thrilled enough to be getting a salary, and health insurance – health insurance! – that this did not bother me much.
“Yeah,” Mike continued, “Stuff like that happens around here. It’s on both ends, of course – people do this to make money, and they can make good money doing it.” He shrugged. “They’re a business, you know – for-profit.” This was news to me – I’d assumed something, I don’t know, like this was a PAC, or a non-profit. What had Laurie said in the interview? I couldn’t remember.
“But that makes some things work better. Ok, so now you’re going to cash me out. First you count the cash, then you add up the numbers in that sheet, make sure they match the numbers in the other sheet – “ As flipped through the stacks of bills, Josh came up and clapped me on the back.
“How’d he do?” he asked.
“Got a hundo,” Mike said to him.
“Hundo!” Josh bellowed.
“And on a credit card, no less!” Mike said, holding up the form my military friend had signed.
“Nobody gets a credit card on their first day,” Josh told me. “You’re a natural! Laurie, you hear that? ”
I was happy for the praise. I knew, though, that I’d gotten lucky. That hundo was a fluke, and without it I wouldn’t have made quota. But I felt pretty sure that the next day would be much easier than this last.
I finished the stack of money and started adding up the numbers on the sheet – our squad hadn’t done very well at all, but Mike didn’t seem fazed. I mentioned the grandmother who’d given me ten bucks.
“Five kids with her, man. She probably could have used that ten bucks, you know?”
“Probably,” he nodded. “But look at it this way. She will live without it. In the meantime, she now feels like she’s done something—she’s participated. That’s worth more than ten bucks. She’ll take that home with her.” He wrapped up the money in one of the numbers sheets, and dropped it in a tattered FedEx envelope. “And that’s that.”
* * *
The rest of the first day is a blur; I remember standing around awkwardly as a lot of tasks got done in quick succession. I took several opportunities to sit down, unshoe and massage my feet. I filled out contract forms, and health insurance information – health insurance! Around 10:15, Josh let me go. “It’s been a long day, I bet. See you in ten hours.”
* * *
By the time I got home, Blake was already asleep. Her job at the farmer’s markets had her up at 4:30 AM; it was already 11.
There was a packed lunch on the counter – chili. A whole pot of it was in the fridge. Next to the brown lunch bag was a note that said “I love you.”
posted by Greg Bloom at 5/09/2005 01:59:00 AM
Sucka AD
It was fifteen minutes until I made my first contact. A college girl, coming out of a store with two shopping bags on one arm and a girlfriend on the other. I saw my reflection in her sunglasses as I gave her the rap, a bit halting but more or less complete.
We only have 69 days left until the election, and right now is a critical time.
She nodded in the right places and shook her head in the right places, but I choked on the Ask –
We’re asking for a, uh, contribution of a… hundred dollars…
She flinched and her friend rolled her eyes. I balked –
Or, you know, whatever you can give…
She took out her parents’ credit card and signed the credit card form – twenty bucks. “I’ve just got to do something,” she said to her friend, who smiled at her like one would at a precocious child. She signed her name on the card form with a little loop at the end of her signature. The girls walked off to keep shopping.
I was relieved to have notched up some marks almost right off the bat, but looking back I know that I could have banked on that girl. If I’d known what I was doing, I could have gotten a hundred easy.
The other canvasser came up to me, excited, asking how much I made. Twenty dollars wasn’t much to be excited about, but it would be another hour before she would even get that. She was already making a little grimace with every person that passed by without response. I started checking myself against the mistakes she was making.
* * *
Mike switched in for me, and I went over to Alan’s side of the street. Alan, who told me he’d been doing this job ‘forever,’ was pretty blatantly feigning his enthusiasm at this point. He wasn’t even saying the standard call, choosing to mix it up for his own personal amusement.
Sir, you look like you could use a new president!
Some people laughed, but few were stopping. To the ones who shot back angry retorts at him, he rolled his eyes and would say, “I take it back, you deserve what you get!” Within a half an hour, with one person having stopped and given him a dollar, he was grumbling about how ‘they’ keep sending him to ‘dumpy places.’
I was getting the call out fine now, although the rhythm was surprisingly difficult to get down. This wasn’t like in the office, when Josh had me walk right toward him and stop two feet away; these people were moving, they had somewhere to go, and they did not mean to have any conversations en route. A person walking at full speed down the street covers ten feet in about three seconds, about twice the amount of time it takes to say
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
without your words blending together and just becoming mangled white street noise. That leaves a second and a half for someone to react, which is more than enough for a person to forego the social graces entirely and simply pretend that no one had addressed them in the first place. It was like standing in a stream and tried to catch a fish with your hands.
Three guys came walking by and I played to my strengths among this crowd –
Hey boys, fine day today, fine enough to make you want to help beat George Bush, right?
“Not today, buddy!” They were passing me, laughing. I turned around, walking with them a little bit.
If not now, when?
Oh, I set myself up for that one – that response was a knee-jerk reflex, and it would take me forever to train myself not to say it, because the answer inevitably was:
“On November 2nd!”
The guys were laughing loud now, and – turned around to face them – I watched them go. Others were walking past them toward me, so I called again –
Hi, do you want to help elect John Kerry today?
“Hey, come on now!” It was Alan. I turned back around and shrugged – what?
“If you’re taking those people, who am I supposed to take?”
He shook his head in frustration – not only had he been stuck with a dumpy place, he also had a stupid novice here to screw things up for him. I apologized, but he wasted no time putting on a mighty fake smile and telling someone who walked to the right of me that they looked like they could use a new president.
When the person passed by without acknowledging that, yes, they could in fact use a new president, Alan looked back at me as if his reprimand hadn’t been interrupted. “And another thing, don’t trail people. It makes them mad, for one, and other people get nervous seeing you dart all over the place. Anyway you’re never gonna make anything that way.”
Chastened, I stayed put for the next half hour. Many of the people who came my way, I noticed, were coming from the subway entrance down the block. A few people stopped to talk to me – once or twice I even got through the whole rap. It wasn’t successful, though – I’d finish the rap, slightly out of breath, and they would demur, as politely and sympathetically as possible. I got some tens, a couple of singles from people who wouldn’t even wait for me to finish the rap – they just went right for their wallets, hardly even coming to a stop; someone asked if I had change for a twenty, and while on any other day afterward I would have smoothly shamed them into giving that and more, right then I just shook my head and said stupidly, ‘sorry.’ I took note of each name and dollar amount on a black and white ‘tick sheet’ at the bottom of the papers on my clipboard.
My feet were starting to ache after just a few hours, and I shifted on them in my little square of sidewalk – one step forward, past the phone booth, to move forward into the call; one step backward, into the view of the men’s clothing store window, to give me an extra half-second to stay with someone trying to pass.
The store manager came outside. “Listen, you guys, I sympathize wit what you’re doing, but you’re doing it in front of my store like two days a week. Can you just kindly stay away from the entranceway?” Alan shrugged. We moved.
Five minutes later, I looked up and Alan was gone. Fine with me – I turned sideways and tried to pivot between both streams of traffic. The movement loosened me up, working both sides, and the next person that stopped listened all the way through the rap, even though she was obviously trying to get back to work. I hit all the rap’s points and she took the clipboard right when I handed it to her, signed the board and then signed over a check for fifty bucks. She thanked me ‘for doing this,’ and I thanked her for giving such support.
* * *
An elderly black woman pushing a stroller, swarmed by four kids orbiting around her and hanging from the stroller, was going slow enough that we had half a conversation before she even pulled the caravan to a halt next to me.
Hi m’am, do you want to help beat George Bush today?
“Oh you know I do! Got to get him out.”
That’s great! My name is Greg, I’m with the Democratic National Committee. We’re working to elect John Kerry and other Democrats to office this November.
“Well so am I, you know it! I’m helping out with a neighborhood group, we’re going round to talk to people, registering voters, all that stuff.”
“That’s great!” I said. “What is the response like?”
“Oh, people are really into it. Unbelievable. I’ve never seen it like this, the whole neighborhood is involved.” I wanted to hear more about it, but her kids were getting frantic and I thought they would soon steal her attention.
Well, m’am, it’s really great that you’re involved. We need people like you now more than ever, and we have to start looking ahead – there’s only 69 days left – to make sure that we devote all the resources we can to where it really counts – the swing states.
I was piecing together from all over the rap, not bothering to go through the motions. I also was not going to ask this grandmother with five children and a wobbly stroller for a hundred bucks.
We need all the support you’re able to give.
She could give me ten dollars. I notched it on my tick sheet.
* * *
For another hour, professional people in twos and threes, with sharp clothes and quick gaits, flooded the streets on their lunch hours. Most of them passed me by – I was reluctant to interrupt their conversations, to take part of their lunch hour away from them.
By one o’clock, I’d asked several hundreds of people if they wanted to help beat George Bush.
Half of them hadn’t even looked at me. I kept checking my tick sheet – all this hustle, and not even a hundred dollars total. I patted the cash in my pocket, every ten minutes or so.
Mike came over to see how we were doing – the girl was working on sixty bucks. I was not much better, but neither was Mike it turned out. “Some days this is just how it is,” he told us.
“Don’t worry about it, go get some lunch.”
I walked inside the coffee shop ten yards away. The counter girl nodded at the DNC logo on my shirt and handed me a sandwich for free – “keep it up out there,” she told me. The sandwich suddenly was definitely the best donation I’d gotten all day. The girl came in shortly behind me (she didn’t get a free sandwich, I noticed) and plopped down at the table next to me.
“I can’t figure out where they get those numbers they told us. $300-500 a week,” she said, “at this rate I won’t even get that much money.” She certainly wouldn’t, in fact if she didn’t raise over quota in the next two days, I knew she wouldn’t be hired on at all. Even then, just raising quota would not get her near that pay scale boasted in the Craigslist ads. I could already tell that anyone making $500 a week was doing some serious hustle.
* * *
I read the Village Voice while scarfing down the sandwich. It was already telling everyone how to get ready for the Republican National Convention; one section was a breakdown of the protests planned, another was a list of the hottest parties. A sidebar explained how tear gas works and what to do if it gets in your eyes.
* * *
I walked out of the coffeeshop feeling fed and fresh, and the aching in my feet had momentarily let up.
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
I said it before I’d even reach the center of the sidewalk. The person passed. I pivoted and called again –
Hi, do you want to help elect John Kerry?
And again, and again. It was like I was having a conversation with the whole street; like I was at a party, offering to fetch people drinks. I got in the rhythm, amusing myself even more with each refrain like it was a running gag, and then just a minute later I saw a kid – just a kid – wearing a military uniform walking toward me. Punchline, I thought.
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
He stopped right in front of me, all ears. I was so surprised I almost lost the rap. But skipping just half a beat I got back on track, and when I got to the Ask I was full speed and not about to flinch –
The best way you can contribute is with a hundred dollars, check or credit card. We need to make sure that we get as many resources as possible to where it matters most – the swing states.
He nodded and pulled out a credit card without hesitation – a military card, air force – and signed the form for $100. He walked away; I don’t remember him saying a word the whole time.
* * *
That was my only big score for the rest of the day. By 4 o’clock, I’d made $225. And I was exhausted. But the day was not even close to finished.
We only have 69 days left until the election, and right now is a critical time.
She nodded in the right places and shook her head in the right places, but I choked on the Ask –
We’re asking for a, uh, contribution of a… hundred dollars…
She flinched and her friend rolled her eyes. I balked –
Or, you know, whatever you can give…
She took out her parents’ credit card and signed the credit card form – twenty bucks. “I’ve just got to do something,” she said to her friend, who smiled at her like one would at a precocious child. She signed her name on the card form with a little loop at the end of her signature. The girls walked off to keep shopping.
I was relieved to have notched up some marks almost right off the bat, but looking back I know that I could have banked on that girl. If I’d known what I was doing, I could have gotten a hundred easy.
The other canvasser came up to me, excited, asking how much I made. Twenty dollars wasn’t much to be excited about, but it would be another hour before she would even get that. She was already making a little grimace with every person that passed by without response. I started checking myself against the mistakes she was making.
* * *
Mike switched in for me, and I went over to Alan’s side of the street. Alan, who told me he’d been doing this job ‘forever,’ was pretty blatantly feigning his enthusiasm at this point. He wasn’t even saying the standard call, choosing to mix it up for his own personal amusement.
Sir, you look like you could use a new president!
Some people laughed, but few were stopping. To the ones who shot back angry retorts at him, he rolled his eyes and would say, “I take it back, you deserve what you get!” Within a half an hour, with one person having stopped and given him a dollar, he was grumbling about how ‘they’ keep sending him to ‘dumpy places.’
I was getting the call out fine now, although the rhythm was surprisingly difficult to get down. This wasn’t like in the office, when Josh had me walk right toward him and stop two feet away; these people were moving, they had somewhere to go, and they did not mean to have any conversations en route. A person walking at full speed down the street covers ten feet in about three seconds, about twice the amount of time it takes to say
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
without your words blending together and just becoming mangled white street noise. That leaves a second and a half for someone to react, which is more than enough for a person to forego the social graces entirely and simply pretend that no one had addressed them in the first place. It was like standing in a stream and tried to catch a fish with your hands.
Three guys came walking by and I played to my strengths among this crowd –
Hey boys, fine day today, fine enough to make you want to help beat George Bush, right?
“Not today, buddy!” They were passing me, laughing. I turned around, walking with them a little bit.
If not now, when?
Oh, I set myself up for that one – that response was a knee-jerk reflex, and it would take me forever to train myself not to say it, because the answer inevitably was:
“On November 2nd!”
The guys were laughing loud now, and – turned around to face them – I watched them go. Others were walking past them toward me, so I called again –
Hi, do you want to help elect John Kerry today?
“Hey, come on now!” It was Alan. I turned back around and shrugged – what?
“If you’re taking those people, who am I supposed to take?”
He shook his head in frustration – not only had he been stuck with a dumpy place, he also had a stupid novice here to screw things up for him. I apologized, but he wasted no time putting on a mighty fake smile and telling someone who walked to the right of me that they looked like they could use a new president.
When the person passed by without acknowledging that, yes, they could in fact use a new president, Alan looked back at me as if his reprimand hadn’t been interrupted. “And another thing, don’t trail people. It makes them mad, for one, and other people get nervous seeing you dart all over the place. Anyway you’re never gonna make anything that way.”
Chastened, I stayed put for the next half hour. Many of the people who came my way, I noticed, were coming from the subway entrance down the block. A few people stopped to talk to me – once or twice I even got through the whole rap. It wasn’t successful, though – I’d finish the rap, slightly out of breath, and they would demur, as politely and sympathetically as possible. I got some tens, a couple of singles from people who wouldn’t even wait for me to finish the rap – they just went right for their wallets, hardly even coming to a stop; someone asked if I had change for a twenty, and while on any other day afterward I would have smoothly shamed them into giving that and more, right then I just shook my head and said stupidly, ‘sorry.’ I took note of each name and dollar amount on a black and white ‘tick sheet’ at the bottom of the papers on my clipboard.
My feet were starting to ache after just a few hours, and I shifted on them in my little square of sidewalk – one step forward, past the phone booth, to move forward into the call; one step backward, into the view of the men’s clothing store window, to give me an extra half-second to stay with someone trying to pass.
The store manager came outside. “Listen, you guys, I sympathize wit what you’re doing, but you’re doing it in front of my store like two days a week. Can you just kindly stay away from the entranceway?” Alan shrugged. We moved.
Five minutes later, I looked up and Alan was gone. Fine with me – I turned sideways and tried to pivot between both streams of traffic. The movement loosened me up, working both sides, and the next person that stopped listened all the way through the rap, even though she was obviously trying to get back to work. I hit all the rap’s points and she took the clipboard right when I handed it to her, signed the board and then signed over a check for fifty bucks. She thanked me ‘for doing this,’ and I thanked her for giving such support.
* * *
An elderly black woman pushing a stroller, swarmed by four kids orbiting around her and hanging from the stroller, was going slow enough that we had half a conversation before she even pulled the caravan to a halt next to me.
Hi m’am, do you want to help beat George Bush today?
“Oh you know I do! Got to get him out.”
That’s great! My name is Greg, I’m with the Democratic National Committee. We’re working to elect John Kerry and other Democrats to office this November.
“Well so am I, you know it! I’m helping out with a neighborhood group, we’re going round to talk to people, registering voters, all that stuff.”
“That’s great!” I said. “What is the response like?”
“Oh, people are really into it. Unbelievable. I’ve never seen it like this, the whole neighborhood is involved.” I wanted to hear more about it, but her kids were getting frantic and I thought they would soon steal her attention.
Well, m’am, it’s really great that you’re involved. We need people like you now more than ever, and we have to start looking ahead – there’s only 69 days left – to make sure that we devote all the resources we can to where it really counts – the swing states.
I was piecing together from all over the rap, not bothering to go through the motions. I also was not going to ask this grandmother with five children and a wobbly stroller for a hundred bucks.
We need all the support you’re able to give.
She could give me ten dollars. I notched it on my tick sheet.
* * *
For another hour, professional people in twos and threes, with sharp clothes and quick gaits, flooded the streets on their lunch hours. Most of them passed me by – I was reluctant to interrupt their conversations, to take part of their lunch hour away from them.
By one o’clock, I’d asked several hundreds of people if they wanted to help beat George Bush.
Half of them hadn’t even looked at me. I kept checking my tick sheet – all this hustle, and not even a hundred dollars total. I patted the cash in my pocket, every ten minutes or so.
Mike came over to see how we were doing – the girl was working on sixty bucks. I was not much better, but neither was Mike it turned out. “Some days this is just how it is,” he told us.
“Don’t worry about it, go get some lunch.”
I walked inside the coffee shop ten yards away. The counter girl nodded at the DNC logo on my shirt and handed me a sandwich for free – “keep it up out there,” she told me. The sandwich suddenly was definitely the best donation I’d gotten all day. The girl came in shortly behind me (she didn’t get a free sandwich, I noticed) and plopped down at the table next to me.
“I can’t figure out where they get those numbers they told us. $300-500 a week,” she said, “at this rate I won’t even get that much money.” She certainly wouldn’t, in fact if she didn’t raise over quota in the next two days, I knew she wouldn’t be hired on at all. Even then, just raising quota would not get her near that pay scale boasted in the Craigslist ads. I could already tell that anyone making $500 a week was doing some serious hustle.
* * *
I read the Village Voice while scarfing down the sandwich. It was already telling everyone how to get ready for the Republican National Convention; one section was a breakdown of the protests planned, another was a list of the hottest parties. A sidebar explained how tear gas works and what to do if it gets in your eyes.
* * *
I walked out of the coffeeshop feeling fed and fresh, and the aching in my feet had momentarily let up.
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
I said it before I’d even reach the center of the sidewalk. The person passed. I pivoted and called again –
Hi, do you want to help elect John Kerry?
And again, and again. It was like I was having a conversation with the whole street; like I was at a party, offering to fetch people drinks. I got in the rhythm, amusing myself even more with each refrain like it was a running gag, and then just a minute later I saw a kid – just a kid – wearing a military uniform walking toward me. Punchline, I thought.
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush?
He stopped right in front of me, all ears. I was so surprised I almost lost the rap. But skipping just half a beat I got back on track, and when I got to the Ask I was full speed and not about to flinch –
The best way you can contribute is with a hundred dollars, check or credit card. We need to make sure that we get as many resources as possible to where it matters most – the swing states.
He nodded and pulled out a credit card without hesitation – a military card, air force – and signed the form for $100. He walked away; I don’t remember him saying a word the whole time.
* * *
That was my only big score for the rest of the day. By 4 o’clock, I’d made $225. And I was exhausted. But the day was not even close to finished.
posted by Greg Bloom at 5/09/2005 01:50:00 AM
A moment of Zen?
[Where were we? Oh yes. My first day, training has just finished.]
We gathered outside of the office and milled about. (I feel weird calling it an ‘office.’ I won’t press the point, but I encourage you to imagine that there are little quotation marks floating around the word every time I use it.) Mike put a few of us together at the edge of the crowd – in our crew there was one other new girl and Alan who must have been in his late fifties – and I watched the other crews. I still didn’t have a good idea of who was a director, who was a staffer, who was brand new. Some of the youngest talked like they’d been doing this all year; some of the older people – and there were some who looked like they were up on fifty, sixty years old – stood around looking halfway comfortable. I listened in on some conversations, while scanning over the rap with half an eye. People talked about what turf they were headed to, traded stories, laughing at jokes that went a little too quickly past me.
We were soon on the subway, Alan talked loudly to Mike about the other day – “So yeah, I’ve missed quota a few days this week, but I’ve told Josh like five times it’s because they keep sending me to midtown! How can anybody make a decent buck in that place? I keep telling him, send me uptown, uptown! What can I do if they don’t listen?”
“Well, what about Chelsea, can you do your thing there?” Mike said, with barely a trace of impatience in his voice. Chelsea was where we were headed. All I knew about Chelsea was that apparently a lot of boys were from there.
Alan sighed. I noticed people on the subway noticing us.
“What did you make yesterday?” Mike asked.
“I dunno, something like…one fifty or something,” said Alan, mumbling so that I barely heard him.
“Alright, well today,” Mike said, “let’s say you do two fifty. Nothing heroic, just get yourself back on the ball. I did, let’s see, I did 425 yesterday. It was a pretty good day. I’m gonna do—“ Mike looked over at the new girl and I, “—five hundred. A cool five.”
“You guys,” he said to us, “you’re new so don’t really worry about it. Get the hang of it. If you score big, of course, that’s great for me,” he laughed, “but today you’re just out there to observe, remember.” As our field manager, I’d learned already, Mike would ‘bonus’ from the money that we made over our quota. Quota was something like $200 that day – “that’s pretty low,” I’d heard Josh comment to another director back at the office – so Mike would bonus a third of any money either of the newbies raised over that. “You guys have any questions about the rap?” I shook my head – I was pretty sure I knew it. I was looking over the extra sheets I’d grabbed, with information about Bush’s record on them.
“Do you use these?” I asked Mike. He shook his head, frowning. His clipboard only had the ‘statement of support’ sheets, the credit card forms, and the ‘tick sheet’ where we were supposed to tally the names and contributions of everyone who gave to us.
“Some people do. Not really useful for me – you’ll see why. Today, just focus on the rap.”
The girl canvasser asked me if I’d been doing this long. I told her it was my first day, and she said “Oh, mine too! I’m thrilled I’ve finally got a job. I mean, it’s great to do this work and all, but it’s really great that we’ll get paid pretty well. Not today, I guess. What do you think about that, us not getting paid today?”
I didn’t bother to tell her that I was on salary, as a director. I shrugged, and skimmed over the rap.
Our top priority is to put resources in to key swing states and reach every possible vote. The best way you can help is by…
* * *
When we came out of the subway, Mike and Alan scoped the street we’d been sent to. Mike shrugged – this’ll do.
We did a little huddle in the sidewalk, crossing our arms over our clipboards and scoping the street like it was a playing field. People rushed by us on their way into the subway. Mike explained that we would pair off, two on each side of the street. We would stand facing each other in the middle of the sidewalk with about ten feet of space in between. When someone was just about to pass our partner, we would put out the call. “Try not to get bogged down with people – if you need any help getting away from someone, catch my eye, I’ll be right over.”
He walked to the other side of the street with Alan, and the girl and I looked at each other a little helplessly. We stepped lightly to the middle of the sidewalk, shifting on our feet; I was suddenly aware of the flow of traffic on the street, it wasn’t moving with individual people but as a pattern – one person every fifteen yards or so, someone passed every twenty seconds. The girl cleared her throat, looked around, picked up her posture with a bit of a jerk, and looked over at someone passing on my right –
Hi, do you want to help –
The person was already beside her, and hadn’t reacted in any way. The call died coming out of her mouth – whether it would be ‘elect Kerry’ or ‘beat Bush,’ she probably didn’t even know. She looked at me with exasperation already on her face – I shrugged. I looked past her – two people on the block, about twenty seconds away. I played the interaction out in my mind in advance – remember the rap, introduce yourself, set the scene, ‘record numbers of people already on board,’ then the Ask… here he comes, call right when he’s behind her… he doesn’t see me, he’s looking this way but he’s definitely not making eye contact, he looks kind of familiar…wait a minute, is that --
I figured I was just imagining at first, but it was a strange enough thing to imagine that I froze up and gawked, standing in the middle of the sidewalk like I was there for the hell of it – then, when he was about six feet away from me, short with a baseball cap on and grayer hair than I expected, I was sure enough… and then he was gone –
It was Jon Stewart.
I stood there as the next person walked by me too, while I replayed his passing in my head to make sure…the girl in front of me was still having trouble getting the whole call out to people. I walked over to her – “That was Jon Stewart!”
“Did you get him?”
“What? No! I was totally not ready…I froze!”
“I heard someone canvassed Carson Daly the other day.”
This report failed to impress me; I was still busy kicking myself for having such terribly slow reflexes. I don’t know that there was any other person in the world who I could possibly have wanted more to give me money to beat George Bush, and here he walked by me just as I was dipping my damn toe in the water. A mean joke. I wonder if he would have stopped; maybe he would have given me a nod, thumbs up, although I dunno if he’d given money; maybe I could have made him laugh with some witty shout.
The girl looked behind me and abruptly called out – Hi, do you want to beat George Bush? – and this time her mark actually slowed down, so I backed away. A couple more people passed by in my direction while I stood there still. I looked over across the street at Mike and saw his stance – legs spread as wide as his shoulders, arms by his side with his clipboard hanging wide – and mimicked it myself. I tried to clear my head.
The next person, I’m calling the next person –
The front door of the drug store next to us swung open and a tall man in a sharp suit stepped out. He walked swiftly toward me, and I made eye contact with him and called –
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush today?
I was late, he was already at my side, but this guy responded – unfortunately.
“Are you a faggot too, like John Kerry?”
He was behind me before his retort was finished. I paused, then said to the empty space in front of me – “No, sir. Have a nice day.”
Nobody else heard our exchange, but it hung in the air. The interaction replayed in my head like the one with Stewart – the man’s face taut with a scowl, his gait forcing forward through my span on the sidewalk, his comment defensive and taunting and angry and ugly and stupid – until it dissipated in the air and I looked back down the street to the next people walking toward me. That was not so bad, actually, I thought…in fact, that was totally easy. I’d come to face the Opposition, and here on the street at least it was raging but impotent. And Josh was right, if any of these other people had heard him say that, they would have given to me – just to spite his hate.
“This job,” I thought to myself after a minute, “is awesome.”
* * *
The guy, my first mark, was not much of a Chelsea boy, I guess. Nobody could mistake John Kerry for a fag – if there was a Queer Eye for social charms, few politicians would benefit from it as much as John Kerry. (The New Jersey governor McGreevey, though– he would make a fine, strapping and dapper campaigner, I am sure…)
It was a brute, reflexive reaction, and one that I provoked unnecessarily. I would soon learn that people coming out of doors simply don’t make good marks – not that this guy was going to give me money in any case, but he was quicker to snarl, just as someone sympathetic would have been quicker to brush me off – as people are passing through doors, crossing over thresholds, they are guarded. It’s best to get them as they are cruising forward in a holding pattern that can be interrupted and then intercepted… that or they will ignore you completely, which is as far as you’re concerned the second best reaction you can get from a person.
We gathered outside of the office and milled about. (I feel weird calling it an ‘office.’ I won’t press the point, but I encourage you to imagine that there are little quotation marks floating around the word every time I use it.) Mike put a few of us together at the edge of the crowd – in our crew there was one other new girl and Alan who must have been in his late fifties – and I watched the other crews. I still didn’t have a good idea of who was a director, who was a staffer, who was brand new. Some of the youngest talked like they’d been doing this all year; some of the older people – and there were some who looked like they were up on fifty, sixty years old – stood around looking halfway comfortable. I listened in on some conversations, while scanning over the rap with half an eye. People talked about what turf they were headed to, traded stories, laughing at jokes that went a little too quickly past me.
We were soon on the subway, Alan talked loudly to Mike about the other day – “So yeah, I’ve missed quota a few days this week, but I’ve told Josh like five times it’s because they keep sending me to midtown! How can anybody make a decent buck in that place? I keep telling him, send me uptown, uptown! What can I do if they don’t listen?”
“Well, what about Chelsea, can you do your thing there?” Mike said, with barely a trace of impatience in his voice. Chelsea was where we were headed. All I knew about Chelsea was that apparently a lot of boys were from there.
Alan sighed. I noticed people on the subway noticing us.
“What did you make yesterday?” Mike asked.
“I dunno, something like…one fifty or something,” said Alan, mumbling so that I barely heard him.
“Alright, well today,” Mike said, “let’s say you do two fifty. Nothing heroic, just get yourself back on the ball. I did, let’s see, I did 425 yesterday. It was a pretty good day. I’m gonna do—“ Mike looked over at the new girl and I, “—five hundred. A cool five.”
“You guys,” he said to us, “you’re new so don’t really worry about it. Get the hang of it. If you score big, of course, that’s great for me,” he laughed, “but today you’re just out there to observe, remember.” As our field manager, I’d learned already, Mike would ‘bonus’ from the money that we made over our quota. Quota was something like $200 that day – “that’s pretty low,” I’d heard Josh comment to another director back at the office – so Mike would bonus a third of any money either of the newbies raised over that. “You guys have any questions about the rap?” I shook my head – I was pretty sure I knew it. I was looking over the extra sheets I’d grabbed, with information about Bush’s record on them.
“Do you use these?” I asked Mike. He shook his head, frowning. His clipboard only had the ‘statement of support’ sheets, the credit card forms, and the ‘tick sheet’ where we were supposed to tally the names and contributions of everyone who gave to us.
“Some people do. Not really useful for me – you’ll see why. Today, just focus on the rap.”
The girl canvasser asked me if I’d been doing this long. I told her it was my first day, and she said “Oh, mine too! I’m thrilled I’ve finally got a job. I mean, it’s great to do this work and all, but it’s really great that we’ll get paid pretty well. Not today, I guess. What do you think about that, us not getting paid today?”
I didn’t bother to tell her that I was on salary, as a director. I shrugged, and skimmed over the rap.
Our top priority is to put resources in to key swing states and reach every possible vote. The best way you can help is by…
* * *
When we came out of the subway, Mike and Alan scoped the street we’d been sent to. Mike shrugged – this’ll do.
We did a little huddle in the sidewalk, crossing our arms over our clipboards and scoping the street like it was a playing field. People rushed by us on their way into the subway. Mike explained that we would pair off, two on each side of the street. We would stand facing each other in the middle of the sidewalk with about ten feet of space in between. When someone was just about to pass our partner, we would put out the call. “Try not to get bogged down with people – if you need any help getting away from someone, catch my eye, I’ll be right over.”
He walked to the other side of the street with Alan, and the girl and I looked at each other a little helplessly. We stepped lightly to the middle of the sidewalk, shifting on our feet; I was suddenly aware of the flow of traffic on the street, it wasn’t moving with individual people but as a pattern – one person every fifteen yards or so, someone passed every twenty seconds. The girl cleared her throat, looked around, picked up her posture with a bit of a jerk, and looked over at someone passing on my right –
Hi, do you want to help –
The person was already beside her, and hadn’t reacted in any way. The call died coming out of her mouth – whether it would be ‘elect Kerry’ or ‘beat Bush,’ she probably didn’t even know. She looked at me with exasperation already on her face – I shrugged. I looked past her – two people on the block, about twenty seconds away. I played the interaction out in my mind in advance – remember the rap, introduce yourself, set the scene, ‘record numbers of people already on board,’ then the Ask… here he comes, call right when he’s behind her… he doesn’t see me, he’s looking this way but he’s definitely not making eye contact, he looks kind of familiar…wait a minute, is that --
I figured I was just imagining at first, but it was a strange enough thing to imagine that I froze up and gawked, standing in the middle of the sidewalk like I was there for the hell of it – then, when he was about six feet away from me, short with a baseball cap on and grayer hair than I expected, I was sure enough… and then he was gone –
It was Jon Stewart.
I stood there as the next person walked by me too, while I replayed his passing in my head to make sure…the girl in front of me was still having trouble getting the whole call out to people. I walked over to her – “That was Jon Stewart!”
“Did you get him?”
“What? No! I was totally not ready…I froze!”
“I heard someone canvassed Carson Daly the other day.”
This report failed to impress me; I was still busy kicking myself for having such terribly slow reflexes. I don’t know that there was any other person in the world who I could possibly have wanted more to give me money to beat George Bush, and here he walked by me just as I was dipping my damn toe in the water. A mean joke. I wonder if he would have stopped; maybe he would have given me a nod, thumbs up, although I dunno if he’d given money; maybe I could have made him laugh with some witty shout.
The girl looked behind me and abruptly called out – Hi, do you want to beat George Bush? – and this time her mark actually slowed down, so I backed away. A couple more people passed by in my direction while I stood there still. I looked over across the street at Mike and saw his stance – legs spread as wide as his shoulders, arms by his side with his clipboard hanging wide – and mimicked it myself. I tried to clear my head.
The next person, I’m calling the next person –
The front door of the drug store next to us swung open and a tall man in a sharp suit stepped out. He walked swiftly toward me, and I made eye contact with him and called –
Hi, do you want to help beat George Bush today?
I was late, he was already at my side, but this guy responded – unfortunately.
“Are you a faggot too, like John Kerry?”
He was behind me before his retort was finished. I paused, then said to the empty space in front of me – “No, sir. Have a nice day.”
Nobody else heard our exchange, but it hung in the air. The interaction replayed in my head like the one with Stewart – the man’s face taut with a scowl, his gait forcing forward through my span on the sidewalk, his comment defensive and taunting and angry and ugly and stupid – until it dissipated in the air and I looked back down the street to the next people walking toward me. That was not so bad, actually, I thought…in fact, that was totally easy. I’d come to face the Opposition, and here on the street at least it was raging but impotent. And Josh was right, if any of these other people had heard him say that, they would have given to me – just to spite his hate.
“This job,” I thought to myself after a minute, “is awesome.”
* * *
The guy, my first mark, was not much of a Chelsea boy, I guess. Nobody could mistake John Kerry for a fag – if there was a Queer Eye for social charms, few politicians would benefit from it as much as John Kerry. (The New Jersey governor McGreevey, though– he would make a fine, strapping and dapper campaigner, I am sure…)
It was a brute, reflexive reaction, and one that I provoked unnecessarily. I would soon learn that people coming out of doors simply don’t make good marks – not that this guy was going to give me money in any case, but he was quicker to snarl, just as someone sympathetic would have been quicker to brush me off – as people are passing through doors, crossing over thresholds, they are guarded. It’s best to get them as they are cruising forward in a holding pattern that can be interrupted and then intercepted… that or they will ignore you completely, which is as far as you’re concerned the second best reaction you can get from a person.
posted by Greg Bloom at 5/09/2005 01:41:00 AM
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