I'm an attorney who came to Columbus Friday from NYC to do canvassing and then poll watching for Obama and wanted to let you know what's happened so far.
First, Saturday, 75 people showed up to be trained to do canvassing. It was amazingly organized with door hangers listing voting locations and lists of all the houses with the residents' names to go visit. Everyone was fired up and ready to go!
I could only do this for a couple of hours because then I was off to the main Obama office in downtown Columbus to get poll watching training. About 60 or 70 attorneys showed up for the training just to cover Franklin County. Again, everyone was fired up and ready to go!
By surprise, Obama scheduled a town hall meeting here in Westerville, a quiet little suburb in Northeast Columbus, the home of Otterbein College. My sister, who lives nearby, and I got tickets, arrived at 10 and waited in the cold until noon when the doors opened. Hillary had an appearance in the same small suburb at 10 that morning. I have no idea how that went, but the line at the Obama rally was ridiculously long. We were lucky. There were only maybe 150 people in front of us. My guess is probably 4000 showed up. About 1000 got into the main gymnasium. There was another hall of some sort that held overflow and some in line didn't get in the building. Obama went to see those outside and the other auditorium before he came and held the town hall where we were.
They finally let us in and to my extreme pleasure, my sis and I got pulled out to get to sit behind Barack with about 20 others. It gave me chills. Of course, I had my ugliest and oldest sweatshirt on, but I didn't really care. What an honor! Since I've gotten home, I got to see myself sitting there and standing up and clapping a few times. Getting picked to sit there was really fun and something I wouldn't have believed would have happened. It sure did make my Sunday!
Barack finally spoke about 2:30 after being introduced by Jay Rockefeller. It was mostly his normal issues stump speech, but as other diaries have noted, he added the line about Hillary not reading the NIE -- BIG HAND! He also added a paragraph or two about reining in the credit card companies that I particularly liked.
After the stump speech, he answered crowd questions for at least another hour. The last question was from a lawyer who asked him about supreme court appointments and whether he would promise to replace Ginsberg with a female. He answered by saying that all of his appointments (not just to the SC) would be intelligent, capable people and that he wanted people who would tell him no unlike Bush who never had anyone tell him it was a bad idea to go into Iraq. He also said that he would nominate appointees who care more about people than corporations. RAH! RAH! He also said he, of course, would seriously consider women for appointment to the Court.
It was wonderful. I felt kinda bad that I wasn't canvassing, but, shit, how often have I gotten to see him, and then to get to sit right behind him. It was really an honor.
Afterwards, he came and shook all of our hands. I told him I was really proud of him (aarrgg!) and that I had come from NY to work on his campaign. He thanked me graciously.
I got to speak to Jay Rockefeller for a moment when he shook my hand. I told him I was really disappointed that he had voted for telecom immunity and that I thought the Protect America Act was really the Protect the Bush Administration Act. He said that the issue was really complicated, but that what he was working on was to make sure that the people in the government who were responsible could be held accountable. I told him that's really what I want as well. At least he heard my question and answered me. Maybe we need to write him some more letters.
Well, tomorrow is more volunteering and, of course, Tuesday I'll be at some polling place from before opening to after closing to make sure there aren't any shenanegans.
I haven't seen any sign here in Columbus that there is much of any kind of ground game by the Clinton campaign. Curious. My sis saw a few women standing on a busy corner holding a sign that said "Honk if you're for Hillary." My sis said nobody was honking. Not much of a ground game.
Anyway, at the end of the day, I felt like I had shaken the hand of the next POTUS. What a feeling.