Keeping all my friends, family, colleagues and classmates up to date as I make my first trip to the Granite State.

Sunday, January 6, 2008

A new phrase in my political vocabulary...."counter-vis"

First of all, I must say I love the Radisson in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Not only is the room clean and comfortable, the breakfast buffet is scrumptious and includes some of the greatest bacon I’ve had in a long time—plus scrambled eggs and fresh fruit. Today after a delicious breakfast and class meeting, we headed into the campaign office to start another day of canvassing. Steve and I rode with a Nashua local named Kim, a woman in her late 30s who shared with us the fact that this primary election will be the first time she’s voted in her life. According to Kim, she never really felt the need to be politically involved. Then recently a friend of Kim’s edified her of the importance of voting, particularly as a resident of the nation’s first primary state. She decided to support Hillary Clinton and has been volunteering at the Nashua office ever since.

After canvassing our first ward map, or neighborhood, Kim decided to take us to a Hillary Clinton rally at Nashua High School North. This was an amazing event which media reports estimated had an attendance of more than 1,000 people. For nearly two hours Hillary took questions from audience members and gave sincere, passionate answers on issues including her health care proposals, universal education, employment and trades training, job growth, and malpractice reform, just to name a few. This is the third time now that I have heard Hillary speak in person, and with each event it becomes clearer to me what the American people will get with a Hillary Clinton presidency: a leader who cares about the issues that truly are important to us, and who will fight for those issues on our behalf.

We canvassed again for another few hours and then headed back into the campaign office, just in time to meet up with the other three USF interns who had been canvassing with a grad student that came up to volunteer for the weekend. We were also just in time to find out that there was a “counter-visibility” event planned a few blocks away outside of Martha’s Exchange. One of the other Democratic candidates was scheduled to rally his supporters in a reception at the restaurant, and our campaign had organized this counter event in which about 50 volunteers and supporters stood across the street waving our signs and chanting our favorite Hillary cheers. We clearly had the opposition outnumbered, they only had maybe 10 or 15 people on their side, plus they only had two 4’x8’ signs, while we had six of the high-visibility 4x8s.

After about 40 minutes at the “counter-vis” event, we returned to the campaign office and learned that there was much work to be completed that night and the staff wanted the interns to stay as late as possible; I remember the number 1 or 2 AM being used. Even though we were all pretty tired after several long days of canvassing, the five of us agreed that we would stay as long as the campaign staff needed us. We filled up on coffee, brownies, pizza and all the other staples of a campaign office. Around 10 PM there was a conference call from the campaign headquarters in Manchester. According to the canvassing tallies, support for Hillary is steadily growing. It seems all the canvassing and “get out the vote” activities are moving more of the undecided voters to our side; of course having Hillary here in New Hampshire, with Bill and Chelsea by her side, may be having much more of an effect than anything else.

After the conference call we folded literature for a couple of hours. New flyers had arrived and they need to be folded and prepped for canvassers to distribute in the morning. Because of a printer problem, it was taking much longer to produce canvassing lists than had been anticipated. Since there was no immediate work to be done, our office manager Saul thanked us for our hard work and arranged a ride for us back to the hotel. Tomorrow, the final day before New Hampshire votes, will be a hectic day. I am looking forward to changing a few more minds, and moving some more undecided voters into the Hillary camp.

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