National Campaign Powered by Local Volunteers

By Sutton R. Stokes, 10-17-08

	Caption: Obama supporters enter the Missoula County Courthouse to vote early on Wednesday.

On Wednesday afternoon, a contingent of Barack Obama supporters were standing in a hallway on the second floor of the Missoula County Courthouse. They had walked down from the campaign’s headquarters on Front Street to vote early as a group, and now they were waiting for the last stragglers to reemerge from room 201, which is serving as the county’s early-voting polling place through noon on November 3rd.

“Three more weeks,” sighed James Anderson, 25, an Army veteran and one of the volunteers who had organized the event.

“I’ll be so glad to start sleeping again,” said Barbara Hand, a volunteer in her 60s.

When asked if she was losing sleep from working too much on the campaign, or from worrying about how the election will turn out, Hand laughed.

“Both!” she said. “This is the most enthralled I’ve ever been with a political campaign, and I’m old enough to have voted for Kennedy.”

Hand is not the only Obama supporter who is feeling on edge as she looks ahead to November 4th. A mere four years since Karl Rove announced the commencement of what he called the “permanent Republican majority,” Democrats can’t be blamed for finding it a little difficult to believe the way this election seems to be turning out.

Whether they believe it or not, of course, things are looking good for the Senator from Illinois. Pollster’s nationwide poll of polls shows Obama leading McCain 50.5 to 43.5 percent, with some polls giving him as much as a 13-point lead.

On Thursday, the day after the final debate, the election-simulation web site Election Projection was giving Obama a 99.1 percent chance of being the one who gets to measure the Oval Office for drapes after all.

Strangest of all, Obama might even be able to count on the help of places like Montana, despite Bush having beaten Kerry here in 2004 by about 20 percentage points. Although Pollster’s aggregation shows Montana to have almost the exact reverse of the nationwide picture, i.e., McCain over Obama, 51.2 to 43.5 percent, the most recent ARG poll measures the local gap at only 5 points, good enough news to have Obama and running mate Joe Biden considering returning to the state for a final push.

That such a move makes sense at all is due in large part to the work of what the Obama campaign says are over 14,000 volunteers at 19 offices scattered around the state. This is as compared to, well, nothing similar that I can find on the part of the McCain campaign, whose web site returns an address in Minnesota when you select Montana on the “state contact information” page.

The ready-made criticism of the Obama get-out-the-vote organization is to compare Obama volunteers to the orange-hatted cadres Howard Dean fielded during the 2004 Democratic primaries.

Dean’s effort was impressive in scale but didn’t secure him many votes in the end, possibly because his youthful volunteers were often outsiders to the communities they canvassed and were most successful at contacting other young people, who were less likely to vote anyway. Republican dead-enders such as U.S. News and World Report columnist Michael Barone seem to be hoping that the same will turn out to be true of Obama volunteers.

You couldn’t prove it by the volunteers I saw on Wednesday at the Obama campaign’s Missoula office, while I waited for the early-voting group to assemble for their march to the courthouse. About a dozen volunteers were working the phones in the old Yellowstone Photo storefront, ranging in age from their twenties to their sixties and more weighted toward the upper end of that range than the lower.

Later, I spoke with volunteer Kay Whitlock, 59, as she took a break from making phone calls to registered voters. She told me about a 91-year-old friend of hers who had been a lifelong Republican until this year. In addition to now trying to convince her friends to support Obama, the nonagenarian has even been canvassing door to door.

Smiling at her friend’s dedication, Whitlock said, “I haven’t seen a multi-generational campaign like this since the 1960s.”

Speaking of which, across from Whitlock sat Mike Wessler, 24. The Missoula resident has been volunteering 8-10 hours a week since August and, though he prefers knocking on doors, estimates that he has made over 1,000 attempts to have the opportunity to recite the following greeting to strangers on the telephone:

”Hi, I’m Mike, and I’m a volunteer with the Barack Obama campaign.”

Mike worked on the Kerry campaign in 2004 but feels more motivated this time around.

“There’s a much more positive feeling on this campaign,” he said. “In 2004, I volunteered just because I was a Democrat. This time, I’m volunteering because I’m excited about the candidate.”

Marikae, 60, who preferred not give her last name, leaned across the table to agree. “We haven’t had a leader inspiring people like this since MLK and JFK. I think this campaign is tapping into something that was always there, but there was no one to tap into it.”

Whitlock dismissed the notion, as common now on the right as it once was among Hillary partisans, that Obama supporters naively believe that their candidate possesses mystical powers of reconciliation and wisdom — that it will be sufficient just to get him to Washington, where he will wave his magic wand and heal a wounded nation.

“Once he’s in, things won’t be perfect,” Whitlock said. “Of course there will be fights over policy. But at least there will be breathing room.”

“First, though,” she said, picking up her phone, “we’ve got to get him in.”

For more information about voting in Montana, click here.

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