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Yesterday morning I rolled off the futon in my brother-in-law's basement in Hanover,NH and prepared to go canvasing. We gave Fiona the day off so she could play with her cousins and got a little bit of a late start as we worked out the play schedule. We had been told to help at the Claremont campaign office. The office manager was glad to see us. He's a young guy from North Carolina fully of energy and working hard to deliver as many votes for Edwards as possible. Like in Iowa, the Edwards campaign is being outspent something like five to one. Dan said that the Hillary campaign had five staffers covering Sullivan county and had recently brought in a bus and two fifteen people vans full of volunteers. Outside, there were Hillary and Obama supporters doing visibility. Sullivan County looked like it might be a hard place to canvas.
Kim's New Hampshire relatives call Claremont 'Brick City' because of all the old brick mills in town. Would the message of a son of a mill worker resonate in an area where so many mills have been closed? Dan asked us to go canvas in Newport. Newport is the county seat of Sullivan County. According to ZipSkinny, a great site that extracts census data based on zipcodes, Newport (03773), has a population of 7649. The median income is $38,573. .4%, or about 30 people, have incomes over $200,000.
As we went door to door, we met a mother with a bad back worried about about how she would provide for her daughter, a man fighting jaundice worried about his health care, and people concerned simply about getting by as their income slipped further and further behind. We met people that desperately need someone that will fight hard for them against the corporate special interests. There were a lot of people still undecided and we had some great discussions.
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After a busy day of canvasing and phonebanking, we returned to my brother-in-law's house. We listened to some of the Democratic debate. Here, I saw the other New Hampshire, a fantasy New Hampshire created by national journalists. The top issue for these fantasy granite staters is the 'Global War on Terror' (tm) and the new cold war where instead of fearing commies with nukes, we need to fear terrorists with nukes. It didn't fit with the granite staters I met who were more concerned about being injured or killed by flaws in our health care system than by some nebulous terrorist from Pakistan.
Later, we found another aspect of the fantasy New Hampshire residents, in this case all of those college professors earning more than $200,000 a year. The only person we met in Newport, whom I guessed was making more than $200,000 was an Obama supporter.
As we watched the debate, I was very impressed with Obama. His comments about bringing new people into politics especially resonated with me. Although, the message of not sitting down to make nice with the lobbyists of irresponsible corporations that Edwards repeated was the most important to me.
Kim commented about what a great team Edwards and Obama would make. They are the two candidates with the fire in the belly to fight the entrenched lobbyists for irresponsible corporations. They could do a great good cop, bad cop routine. President Edwards could use the bully pulpit, the way Teddy Roosevelt did, to challenge the robber barons of the twenty-first century, and Vice President Obama could pull them aside, like the good cop and encourage them to work with Edwards, lest things work out even worse for them. "There is a reason cops pull the good cop, bad cop routine," Kim said, "because it works."
There is a hunger for change sweeping our country. If you look at the past 35 years, you have to wonder about the experience that some people claim they have bringing change over the past 35 years. If you listen to the spokespeople for the large corporate media outlets, like ABC, which don't especially want change, we shouldn't fight for change, or we should realize it isn't going to happen.
So for me, I saw two New Hampshires yesterday. One was the regular people in the town of Newport who need real change, and the other is the fantasy people created by the mainstream media who earn more than $200,000 on their cute little farms in New Hampshire who have more to worry about a new cold war with nuke wielding terrorist than they do to fear from a fatally flawed health care system. I hope that more of the regular people that I met in Newport yesterday get out to vote than those fantasized by the mainstream media. Yet the only way that will happen is if other regular people, like you and I, go door to door and talk with people about the real issues that face our country.
While I would prefer that you go out and canvas for Edwards, going out and canvasing for Obama or Kucinich is better than sitting home and buying the latest media myths. It is time to rise up.
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