When I checked Friday evening, my.BarackObama.com had pulled the plug on the Neighbor to Neighbor feature that printed walk lists. Without walk lists, we would be pretty much flying blind. Sorry for the short notice, but I had hoped the feature might be available again Saturday morning but it's not.
I wanted to provide a nearby event in the neighborhood this weekend people could go to. As it is, the closest canvass staging area at this point is 222 West Broad Street, Richmond, VA where shifts will be running all day Saturday and Sunday. Call the Richmond Obama HQ for more details. You can also find plenty of things to do in the closing days of the campaign at my.BarackObama.com/actioncenter.
Thanks to all the volunteers who participated in the Byrd Park Canvass for Change. Since it began as a weekly event in August, we've knocked on hundreds of doors and covered much of the area. Sorry we're ending, not with a bang, but a whimper, but thanks for your support.
This proves there are a lot of undecided people out there to reach these last few weeks!
A nice video piece focused on Roanoke, which is a good proxy for a lot of places in VA and NC.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/sep/30/roanoke
Debate with a man of the right about Sarah Palin's "credentials," published last week by Richmond.com
http://www.richmond.com/viewpoints/25487
In light of Obama's strong polling in NC, this piece is already a little dated, but this is an essay about Bob Moser's book Blue Dixie arguing that the Democrats can win in the south NOW.
I wrote this for the Independent Weekly in Durham, NC.
http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A264916
By Peter Dreier
September 15, 2008
Peter Dreier's 11-year-old twin daughters, Amelia and Sarah, are volunteering for the Obama Campaign.
Twenty-year-old Tobin Van Ostern finished his sophomore year last spring at George Washington University, but this fall he's enrolled in the Barack Obama campaign as a full-time organizer. The Richmond, Virginia, native started Students for Obama on his campus last year as a Facebook group. It now has chapters on 800 campuses, Van Ostern said, and the campaign has recruited thousands of college students and recent graduates to work as both paid staffers and unpaid volunteers through the November election.
Democratic Party strategists believe that in key swing states, a dramatic increase in turnout among young voters--and African-Americans--can be the key to victory for both Obama and the party's candidates for Congress. Campus activists, meanwhile, view the Obama campaign as a means to catalyze a new progressive youth movement among the Millennial (18- to 29-year-old) generation that they hope, unlike the political crusades of the 1960s youth rebellion, will be part of a broader, multigenerational coalition.
Ever since 18-year-olds won the right to vote in 1971, their elders have been disappointed by their level of voter turnout, which has typically been about half the rate of other voters. But after steady declines in turnout since 1972, young voters reversed the trend in the 2004 presidential and 2006 mid-term elections. This year, however, is likely to see a particularly significant increase in voting among Millennials.
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By Emily P. Walker, Washington Correspondent, MedPage Today
Published: August 29, 2008
DENVER, Aug. 29 -- Mushtaq Sheikh, M.D., an Elmira, N.Y., internist, started out as a Hillary Clinton supporter and considers Republican Sen. John McCain's stance on liability reform to be attractive. But in the end, said the alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention, party loyalty came first. He is a firm backer of Barack Obama for president. "Emotionally, it was a little difficult for me because we had been supporters of Clinton for a long time," Dr. Sheikh said in an interview with MedPage Today. "But this is the same party, and according to the rules, he won the most delegates."
For the 63-year-old internist, Obama's plan to expand healthcare coverage to those who need it carried the day. "I see so many people who don't have insurance, or they have inadequate insurance and I feel so bad about them," said Dr. Sheikh. He said he often reduces prices, or gives free treatment or drug samples to uninsured and underinsured patients.
"First, they've got to cover the 47 million Americans who don't have insurance," Dr. Sheikh said. "And then I think they need to overhaul the whole system."
He added, "Obama's plan is going to be covering everyone. It will be fair to the people who don't have insurance. [Healthcare] should not be a privilege, it should be a right."
By Emily P. Walker
Washington Correspondent, MedPage Today
DENVER, Aug. 29 -- Margaret Hurley, D.O., a solo family practitioner in rural Woodstown, N.J., was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention who came to cheer long and hard for Barack Obama. She recalls getting chills when she first heard Obama speak at the 2004 Democratic Convention, and she still gets them every time she hears him speak. When he entered the race for president last year she visited his Web site and realized she agreed with many of his policies. "He's an amazing leader and visionary and what this country needs right now," Dr. Hurley said in an interview with MedPage Today.
Away from the glamour and glitz of the party conventions, a fierce battle for votes is already being waged on doorsteps across America. Thad Williamson reports on Obama efforts to capture the traditional red state of Virginia.
Link
The New Statesman is an English political magazine. Thad Williamson is a political scientist and an assistant professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond.
This was published by the UK magazine New Statesman today. Great speech by Obama last night!
http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2008/08/obama-campaign-state-virginia
Away from the glamour and glitz of the party conventions, a fierce battle for votes is already being waged on doorsteps across America. Thad Williamson reports on Obama efforts to capture the traditional "red" state of Virginia
Barack Obama supporters campaign on the streets of Richmond, Virginia.
Anyone with eyes to see recognizes that Barack Obama is the first African-American nominated for president by a major party, and anyone with ears to hear recognizes that he is a brilliant orator.
But what makes Obama’s candidacy something truly new in American politics is neither of these things, but how he has married his personal charisma to a campaign strategy that gives grassroots organizing a central role.
Virginia, my home state, represents an excellent test case. At the moment Virginia is one of 10 states listed by pollster.com as a “toss up.” Virginia has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, but shifting demographics, an incompetent state Republican party, and an unusually strong batch of youngish Democratic politicians have moved the state sharply in a “purple” direction in recent years.
The remarkable upset of Republican George Allen by upstart Jim Webb in a 2006 U.S. Senate race marked the re-entry of Virginia as a state “in play” at the national level. That development, combined with Obama’s lopsided victory over Hillary Clinton in the February primary and the strong involvement in the campaign of Governor Tim Kaine have raised hopes that an Obama victory is achievable.
Consequently, the Obama campaign is pouring resources into the state. In Richmond, the campaign has established a headquarters near the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University, one of over 35 such offices around the state. That office, staffed by a team of full-time organizers, serves as the hub for phone banking and coordination of a massive volunteer canvassing effort (over 600 volunteers in the Richmond area are registered with the campaign website).
Organizers also have recruited local supporters to become “precinct captains,” who pledge to raise money for the campaign in their own neighborhood. Engaged supporters also get occasional perks, such as tickets to an invitation-only “town hall” Obama and Kaine conducted last week in suburban Richmond.
All this, combined with the campaign’s massive presence online (including its embrace of blogs and social networking sites), means that this is probably the easiest presidential campaign in history for supporters to get involved with, at least if you have a computer.
I have been a participant-observer in two neighborhood canvasses this summer. The first canvass, on a sweltering Friday evening in June, consisted of a dozen or so volunteers meeting in the parking lot of a public swimming pool, where an organizer provided us a map telling us which blocks to cover, campaign literature, voter registration forms, and information on how to restore your voting rights if you’re are a convicted felon.
My wife and I were assigned to an African-American, primarily middle class neighborhood of homeowners, and were treated to receptions by the doors we knocked on ranging from polite to enthusiastic (one homeowner went so far as provide us several bottles of water as well as a heartfelt “God bless”). Though most we encountered assured us they planned to vote for Obama, we did succeed in registering one voter (recently moved to the neighborhood). Disturbingly, we also encountered half a dozen young African-American men who told us they did not think they could vote due to their police records.
I headed out again on a canvas Monday night, this time in my own neighborhood (a racially integrated, middle-income neighborhood located near a public park) with a 50-something activist and neighborhood resident Chris Martin. Chris told me he that he usually does not get excited about Presidential candidates, but that after years of going to antiwar rallies and vigils he had concluded that getting re-engaged in electoral politics was essential to changing anything.
We traversed the neighborhood, speaking to several Obama supporters (both white and African-American), two undecided voters, two Republicans (one rather good-natured about our visit, the other less so), and one wary apartment complex resident who gave us 10 seconds of her time before closing the door in our faces.
Chris had not just a street map but a detailed computer printout of addresses, names, and demographic information for each of the houses we were to contact. Whereas in June, the focus was voter registration, here the focus was identifying particular people, noting who had moved and who had moved out, and identifying who is voting for whom. The two voters who told us they were undecided can certainly expect repeat visits from the campaign in weeks to come.
This is labor-intensive work, and one has to be quite motivated (as well as thick-skinned) to keep at it. Romantic moments of genuine democratic engagement involving a reasoned exchange of views among citizens are not easily come by. The hope is, however, that these countless hours will raise turnout in November to historically high levels.
This hope is especially high in the city of Richmond (population roughly 190,000), over half of which is African-American, which has voted roughly 75 percent Democratic in recent statewide races and which Obama carried with nearly 80 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary. Notably, 35,000 people voted in the Democratic primary here this year, compared to just 15,000 in 2004.
Whether that heightened interest will translate into a substantial increase in turnout this November compared to 2004, when John Kerry racked up a margin of over 30,000 votes in the city, remains to be seen. Obama’s hopes in Virginia—and the hopes of his admirers around the world - may well rest on the answer.
So I'm sitting in the Carytown, Richmond, VA Starbucks today reading a New York Times article, "Decades later, John Kennedy's 'New Frontier' speech echoes." Synchronistically, the woman across the table resembles Jackie Kennedy, albeit she's using a MacBook. Suddenly, it percolates through my brain that the woman in the photograph on the front page depicting the floor of the Democratic National Convention is none other than "June Van Ostern."
When I first met Jane in Carytown last year, she had just gotten back from Iowa after a stint on the campaign trail and we were gathering signatures to put Barack Obama on the ballot in Virginia. I gave her a copy of The New York Times magazine with Obama on the cover, not realizing she would wind up getting the front page treatment herself. She even achieved a higher media profile than her son, who was profiled inside the A-section of The Washington Post for his Facebook evangelism for Barack. She would go on to become the grassroots co-coordinator for Virginia and Greater Richmond for Obama. I once suggested she should run the Democratic Party of Virginia. Maybe one day she will.
In any case, it just goes to show that when the train leaves the station, sometimes you don't know what the destination will be. I hope this won't the last time we see her in The New York Times and that she won't forget the little people who made her what she is today. (I keed.)
My article today published by Richmond.com:
http://www.richmond.com/news-features/25262
The saying used to go that every man knows how to grill a streak and coach a football team. Perhaps that saying needs to be updated: every liberal, in addition, knows how to run a presidential campaign.
That’s the impression one gets from many recent commentaries about Barack Obama’s campaign from quarters that are desperate for the Illinois senator to win. Those critics are worried that Obama isn’t ahead by more, and fret that the Democrats will once-again let themselves get Swift-boated on the way to yet another narrow electoral defeat.
That said, it would be very wrong for Democrats to hit the panic button.
Second, Obama chose wisely in picking Joe Biden as his running mate. Earlier in this space I endorsed Jim Webb as a good choice. Webb removed his name from consideration, but Biden has the same major plus Webb did: credibility and experience on foreign policy. Beyond this, Biden’s famous sharp tongue and ample sense of self means he won’t be cowed by Republican attacks and worry about trying to be Mr. Nice Guy.
Third, Obama has shown signs last week of moving towards a more direct, populist appeal in his stops in Virginia. I attended the “town hall” at John Tyler Community College in Chester, where Obama and Tim Kaine stressed the issue of economic security and went after McCain hard for being out of touch after the wealthy Arizona senator acknowledged he doesn’t know how many homes he owns. Obama also talked in a very practical way about health care, tax credits for the working poor, investments in green energy and mass transit and shifting resources from Iraq to domestic priorities. Obama needs to keep hammering away at those specifics, and keep raising the issue of whether Americans are better off than they were eight years ago.
Fifth, not to be underestimated is the bounce Obama may get from his Thursday night nomination speech. The sight of an African-American accepting the presidential nomination of a major party will be a hugely emotional, even cathartic experience for many Americans. So far in this campaign, Obama’s speechmaking has been at its best when emotions have been at their peak -- after his victory in the Iowa Caucus, addressing the question of race and Rev. Wright in March, after clinching the nomination in June. Obama has the chance to both define his candidacy and define this race for a truly national audience, and it would be disappointing and surprising if he falls anything short of his compelling best.
Once he’s done all that, he needs to use a firm hand in shaping the day-to-day and hour-to-hour agenda, and not let McCain or the media define the key storylines. Staying on target with the key campaign themes -- the economy, health care, energy, and Iraq -- while simultaneously beating down and beating back attacks from McCain and others on the right will not be easy, and it will be impossible if Obama lets himself (a la John Kerry) get put in the position of playing defense the next two months. Instead, Obama needs to force McCain to try to defend the indefensible, namely the record of George W. Bush and 8 years of Republican leadership in Washington.
Yet even when Obama and Biden slip up this fall, those worried liberals’ best response should not be to whine about their candidates. It should be to get out there and do something to help the ticket win. That’s especially true in a state like Virginia, a state which could plausibly tilt the entire election and where all signs point towards an exceedingly close race, in the manner of Jim Webb’s razor-thin victory over George Allen in 2006.
Grass roots organizing is a foundation of the Obama campaign, and if there's anything Byrd Park in Richmond, VA has, it's lots of grass, not to mention trees and water. With the election less than three months away, people in Byrd Park are organizing for change. Those who live in the area are invited to join the group, Byrd Park Neighborhood for Obama, at
http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/ByrdParkneighborhoodforObama
Even if you don't live immediately in the area, you're still invited to the Byrd Park Neighborhood for Obama canvass every Monday from 7:00-8:00 p.m., meeting at the entrance to the Round House on Lakeview Avenue between Swan and Fountain lakes at the top of the hill near the Columbus statue, conveniently near the Fan and Carytown neighborhoods. We supply the walk lists and literature. You supply the footpower.
The Byrd Park neighborhood is located in and surrounding William Byrd Park in Richmond, VA. The neighborhood is north and east of its namesake and its three lakes; Boat, Swan and Shields. Homes include row houses built in the 1920s, two-story frame bungalows, brick Colonials, Cape Cods, tri-levels, ranchers and American Four Squares mostly built in the 1930s and 1940s. Westover Road hosts a number of large lakefront Spanish, Georgian and Colonial Revival mansions. Fountain Lake features upscale condos. The neighborhood is bounded by the Boulevard, Idlewood Avenue, Meadow Street, and Amelia Avenue to Spottswood Road.
