Standing in the Rain for Webb: Adventures of a First-Time Volunteer Part 2
Today I staked out a small patch of territory at a local polling place in Verona, Virginia, volunteering to spread the last bits of good news about Jim Webb. And it was cold.
I was assigned to greet folks at the polls from 7:30 AM to 12:30 PM. From the get-go, 7:30 AM is not a time that agrees with me. My job would be to pass out sample ballots, and to generally be someone nearby that folks who had questions about Webb could come to at the last minute. When I showed up at the local community center, I was surprised to see how little of a presence the Webb campaign had.
There were only a few Webb signs amongst a forest of Allen signs, and there was no definitive spot for me to set up camp. There would be no camp, in fact. It would just be me and a clipboard overladen with stickers, fliers, and sample ballots.
As I parked, I noticed that the Allen camp had a guy hanging around passing out sample ballots. He eyed me suspiciously as I got out of my car, and noting my stickers and buttons, said, “Don’t suppose there’s any chance I could convert you.”
“No,” I said, smiling, “I’m here to do the same job as you!” I thought we could maybe bond over our similar positions, despite our zero-sum situation. Lord, was I wrong. As soon as I staked out my little patch by arranging a couple of Webb signs around me, the Allen guy (who I will from here on out refer to as “Joey” because of his resemblance to Joey Buttafuoco) immediately started in on me, saying, “You can vote for Webb when he likes guns?” Ha ha. I shook my head and smiled. He said some other things, trying to get me riled up, and I said, “Do you really want to do this?”
Important to note, as I was setting up my signs, my foot slipped off the curb, painfully pulling something in my knee. It hurt quite a bit, but I swallowed the pain because I didn’t want to show weakness to Joey.
As people came in small waves to vote at this early hour, Joey was like a sleazy salesman, stopping everyone he could find, giving them sample ballots, patting their backs, explaining how to vote against gay marriage, etc. It made me a little ill, his friendliness being so forced and slick. Still, I didn’t want to see him beat me, so I stepped up my game. Here’s the thing. All I really had to offer, other than my presence, were the few sample ballots I was given. Sample ballot, by the way, is Latin for “waste of paper”. Let me explain. People would normally accept the samples graciously, but I felt more and more that they were both useless and maybe even a little deceptive. They give the impression that they’re official, government-issue guides, when all they are is a photocopy of a ballot with your candidate’s name checked. That’s it. They couldn’t change anyone’s mind, and at worst, assume you might be stupid enough to think it was a instruction of how you should vote. Anyway, I was happy to run out of them rather quickly. Joey, however, seemed to have ballots for days. He would even make sure folks who already had my sample ballot got a copy of his, as well, along with his back patting and gay bashing.
Then Joey started crossing a couple of lines. At one point, he was talking to an elderly fellow who was clearly a veteran. During a slow period, Joey walked up to me and said, “That gentleman was a Vietnam veteran. He’s for Allen”
I said, “Congratulations.”
Joey went on, “So what does it tell you that he’s for Allen, and that the local VFW is for Allen?” He blustered on, and I interrupted, telling him in one way or another that I thought this was pointless, and asked what he hoped to accomplish. He said, I kid you not, “Hey, man, I’m trying to convince you to leave! Give up, stop wasting your time!”
I told him, “Thank you so much for your generous act of charity.” He said a few more stupid things, revealing his dark, ugly, empty soul, but eventually moved on to bothering more voters.
But Joey’s shenanigans didn’t end there. Virginia law is clear that campaigners have to stay 40 feet away from a polling place, and there were explicit signs saying so. Joey disregarded this rule entirely, not only going close to the entrance of the polling place, but going into the polling place itself to sell his candidate to voters. Lest you think I'm full of poo, I offer photographic evidence of Joey on the steps and just outside the polling place from my cell phone:
Joey's the guy in the dark sweater. Obviously, I don't have pictures of him inside the building, because then I would be violating the same law.
No polling officials did a thing, and when I got upset enough about it, I called the local party chair to ask for instructions. He told me to tell the polling officials, and if they didn’t do anything, the local party would dispatch lawyers. This was the last thing I wanted. I wanted Joey to stop eschewing the law, I didn’t want him to catch me snitching on him so he could club me with a wrench or something (you could see the violence of desperation in his eyes, and hear it in his voice). Luckily, Joey would solve the problem for me with his own weakness. More on that in a minute.
I couldn’t get anywhere with anyone with Joey around. If I spoke to someone for more than ten seconds, Joey would orbit me, and inject himself into the conversation. When a mother trying to get a stroller with her baby inside up the stairs to the entrance, she faltered and the stroller fell backward. I ran to help, but Joey couldn’t stand to see a Webb supporter getting credit for anything, so he pounced and used his considerable girth to take control of the situation. The baby was fine, no big deal, but Joey was grossing me out more and more by the second.
Let me tell you about a few of the people I spoke with. Normally, the entire conversation was, “Good morning! Would you like a sample ballot?” and they’d say yes or no and be on their way with sundry pleasantries. I approached one elderly couple, and as the wife was about to politely accept my ballot, her husband noted by button and proclaimed, “Not if it’s for that SCUMBAG WEBB!” His wife smiled and shook her head. Oh, that husband of mine. Calling war heroes scumbags. What a kidder. Anyway, he yelled “scumbag” a few more times, making me think he had probably just learned the term from a six-year-old grandkid. Obviously, Joey pounced on him faster than Ted Haggard on a crystalline male prostitute.
One middle aged guy asked me, seemingly sincerely, what Webb’s position on abortion is. I thought I knew, but I hemmed and hawed and answer, trying to put it the best way to an apparently pro-life voter. I kicked myself as soon as it was over, telling myself I sounded just like a Democrat. I succeeded in confirming every stereotype about Democratic wafflers and flip-floppers because I didn’t want to turn off a potential voter. I should have just said “he thinks abortion should be legal, safe, and rare.” Lesson learned.
Another fellow I met, a guy maybe a little younger than me, was bedecked in Allen gear. He approached me cautiously and asked if I was working for Webb. I, in as friendly a manner as I could manage, told him, yes, I was volunteering. He seemed surprised that I would be doing this without getting paid, which led me to think that Joey was probably a hired operative (he had the game down a little too well). Anyway, I asked if he was here on behalf of Allen, and he said no, he was just accompanying his uncle (I think), who happened to be the Vietnam vet about whom Joey had bragged. He mentioned his uncle’s status as a vet, and I said, “Well, bless him,” and meant it. This seemed to open the young man up a bit, and he told me about how his uncle loved to swap war stories with his friends, and how utterly horrible some of them were. In sympathy, I said I could only imagine. We parted ways with a handshake, I asked his name, and he said “Rusty.” I’ll remember Rusty for being everything Joey was not. On the other side politically, but still a good guy who’s willing to be friends.
Anyway, back to ragging on Joey. After a run to the restroom, I came back to find a slight spray of rain. It lasted for literally something like thirty seconds, but it was too much for Spineless McSissy (my new name for the Hack-Formerly-Known-As-Joey) who immediately packed up his stuff, got in his truck and drove away. Probably crying.
Finally, I was free of the tyranny of Mr. McSissy, afraid of a little rain. One gentleman emerged from the polling place and introduced himself, revealing himself to be a local Democratic Party head-of-something, and he asked me how it was going. I told him about McSissy, and that I had run out of sample ballots. “That’s okay,” he said, “I think sample ballots are stupid.” Damn right they are.
The rain came back. I was ill prepared, as the weather reports I’d read said that it wouldn’t start to rain until 5 or so, and here it was only about 10 AM. I thought about how I should carry on in this situation, having no umbrella, and I chose to bide my time under a small tree which offered sufficient shelter from the light rain.
As I stood under the tree, a pretty young woman approached me and asked me about my situation. She turned out to be a local newspaper reporter who was covering election day. Her name was Maria, and she asked me questions about what I was doing, what I hoped to accomplish, and then we colluded off the record about our feelings about the Virginia senate race. It was a lovely way to pass some time as the rain got harder and the temperature got colder. Talking to Maria, I realized something about what exactly I was doing by standing out there (“wet and lonely” as she described it). Chances are, there was going to be little in the way of vote-swaying that would happen. More importantly, I realized that by being this one, lonely, pathetic guy, standing in the cold and the rain, under a damn tree, with my signs and buttons and clipboard, people would start to understand that there is something happening. That the Webb campaign and the ideals of the Democratic party mean enough to someone like me to spend five hours simply standing there, ready to talk if you want. It was a way to tell people in the area that these ideals were worth working for, and therefore worth looking at more closely. Maria dug that, and scribbled it down. I’ll let you know if I’m in the paper!
It so happened that the community center was also administering flu shots at the same time as hosting the voting, and more folks asked me about that as they did about the election. Noting that I was clearly freezing and wet, one gentleman said "You should go get a flu shot!" It made me think that had Webb known about the two concurrent events, he could have made a campaign slogan out of it. "Get a flu shot and then vote for Webb: inoculate yourself and inoculate the country!"
It got colder and colder, and wetter and wetter. Luckily, I remembered that I had, months ago, left an umbrella in my car, and was finally able to leave the progressively-useless tree, and stand at my original post. As the time passed, it seemed to pass more and more slowly, and my joints began to ache. My fingers numbed, and my muscles started to tighten, and my knee, which I had hurt earlier, began to express its desire for me to cease using it to hold myself up. It was only 11 or so. I sang to myself to help pass the time.
The chair of the local party, a guy named Bob, showed up to thank me and check on things. He was a really pleasant guy, and he gave me a bottle of water with a Webb sticker on it. I was hoping for something like, say, coffee, that was, you know, hot, but anything was welcome at this point. As we were chatting, a trio of teenagers, two boys and a girl, were seen hanging around. I assumed they had maybe just voted for the first time, and were waiting for a ride back home. One guy looked pretty generic, another had a curly afro and wore a trench coat, and the girl looked straight out of a Phish concert. Obviously Democrats. But as time passed, I saw them occupy Joey’s (I mean McSissy’s) patch of territory, and heard them tell passers by to vote for Allen! I was shocked! How could young people who look like hippies support Allen? “They must hate gays,” I thought, since they started to don anti gay marriage stickers, and then I amended my thought to, “one of them must be gay and ashamed of it.” Recent political events clearly support my theory.
That was about it. The next person assigned to patrol this polling place showed up a little early, and I was thrilled to transfer power. Looking back, I was very glad to have been there, and I think I made a real difference. Maybe not in immediate votes, but a psychological difference, because I was there, because I stayed, because I stood, there for everyone to see.
Upon returning home, all I could think about was hot soup, hot coffee, and how much I wanted to blog about my experience. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about it, and that you’ll get involved, too.
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