Face it. The phone calls are a drag. It’s telemarketing, plain and simple; it’s a politician you’re selling, not magazines or timeshares. And it sucks. It’s wearing and dull. And people are angry. They’ve been called 97 times by 97 different campaigns. They don’t want to talk about their politics to a stranger on the phone. And hell, why should they? As they reminded me repeatedly, it’s their right not to tell anyone how they’re voting. They are right. I can’t argue with them. Also, it turns out, duh, there’s a ton of policy I know f*ck all about.
The hardcore Republicans? Very nice to me. Really nice. Polite. The undecided voters? Totally inscrutable. I’d ask them what issues were important to them in the election and they didn’t know. Are they kidding with that? A bunch of people hung up on me. And I talked to one funny old coot who said this in a slow southern twang:
“I don’t like that Bush. We shouldn’t have gone in there.I fought in WWII. I was 19 years old when I enlisted and I don’t like how we went into Iraq. They’ve been fighting there since time began. And our Lord was there, Jesus was there and they were fighting then and they’re still fighting.” How do you respond to that?
The staffers do the dirty work too, it’s not just the volunteers. the staffer next to me cranked through her list of phone calls while I did mine. What a day. I’m whacked. I must have made a hundred phone calls.
I turned on the radio when I got in to the car. American Pie had just started and I sang along. When I got off the freeway, the huge orange moon was hanging low in the sky. I guess that’s the payoff. The orange moon and “this’ll be the day that I die.”