as it turns out, i’m not the one with mad campaigners disease. when i woke up this morning, i found all of my things piled up next to my bags and my cohort gone. i just assumed that she had gone out for coffee or a snack or perhaps was checking out some of the local sights. i mean, really, who would have even considered that she would have just left me in texas, without a note, a bon voyage, or even a word?
yep, that’s what happened. i mean, yeah, we haven’t been getting along. my friends both outside and inside the campaign can attest to the difficulties. my cohort even described herself as someone who doesn’t get along well with others. for the past several days, she has been verbally abusive to me, completely insensitive (for instance, she started yelling at me a few days ago when i spilled scalding coffee down my chest, burned myself like a mo-fo, and started freaking out and urgently requested that she pull over immediately), and her psychoanalysis of me has had me calling my friends back home asking them questions like, “am i a bad person? do i have low self-esteem? am i difficult to get along with?”
fortunately for me, i can stop worrying that i am unstable and a mean person. in fact, there is one person in the campaign (and i heart you, harlin) who has heard both sides. just this morning, as tears of shock and fear rolled down my face, he gave me a big bear hug and said, “you’re wonderful. she’s crazy. i’ve heard and seen it all and you can rest assured that this is not about you.” so my fellow campaigners are on the phones with the campaign, trying to find me some airline miles or a ride back to los angeles. i figure i’ll get home eventually and i’ve got the support and encouragement of a whole lot of wonderful people so yay for me!
oh and another round of tears is streamin down my face as i write this. susan, a local artist we’ve been working closely with these past days, just gave me a plane ticket. she called southwest, booked a flight back to los angeles tomorrow afternoon and handed me the confirmation number. see, i am a good person because good things are happening in spite of it all…
on to the real madness, yesterday’s critical tuesday primaries…
we lost texas by a teensy margin but seem to be even in the delegate distribution. camp clinton has regained some momentum and this will clearly be a fight to the bloody end. the thing is, we obama volunteers are geared up to keep fighting the good fight. as for me, personally, i have seen so much beauty, hope and wonder in the eyes of texas that there is no way i’m throwing in the towel and going back to life in corporate america (not just yet, anyway)…
as for my first ever election day from inside the campaign… my day began yesterday morning at 2:45am (i got one hour of sleep monday night). i had to report for duty at 3:30 to prepare the caucus packets to start handing out to our precinct captains, starting at 6am. i then spent the day doing voter protection (so glad that law degree is getting some use), fielding calls about all kinds of craziness going on at the polls, and spent the evening driving around to pick up elderly folks to drive them to caucus.
while fielding the voter protection calls, i heard all kinds of crazy stories about voters being turned away, crazed clinton fans accosting obama voters, voters being sent on wild goose chases, broken voting machines, insufficient staffing, and everything else you can imagine. and i thought (perhaps hoped is more apt) the day would go off without a hitch for all of us out-of-state lawyers… the worst part, however, was when i heard that camp clinton was telling the news that obama fraud was going on in the caucus locations. i don’t know about fraud, necessarily. there were just a lot of people who didn’t know the rules, acting like jackasses and giving out a whole lot of misinformation (lotsa people think i’m way too naïve for thinking this way, but i do love my rose colored glasses).
as for the loss of our county (galveston), it turns out that rush limbaugh’s request for republicans to get to the polls to vote for clinton because “we need to bloody obama up a bit” totally turned the results upside down. one third of the clinton votes in our county were cast by repugs. unbelievable!
last night, we volunteers celebrated our hard work with a coupla cocktails and headed off to either go home or head on to the next campaign. there are a few of us in the office today, packing everything up, returning furniture, and getting things in order to move forward. we are all very much fired up to keep marching onward. we know in our hearts that obama will be our next president. we just have to keep working hard, holding on to our faith, and believing that YES WE CAN!
this blog is cross posted at daily kos
Oh my God I cannot even believe she did that! That's completely unbelievable!
ReplyDeleteKeep it up hon. You are doing fabulously!