US Features
Volunteers make up amateur army in presidential election (Feature)
By Eva Font Mendiola Nov 2, 2008, 2:50 GMT
New York - These days it's hardly surprising to have a stranger knocking on your door to tell you how presidential candidate Barack Obama or John McCain is going to change the country and how important it is for you to vote.
In the current race to the White House, thousands of volunteers have fanned out across the country, sacrificing their weekends and devoting their spare time toward such door-to-door canvassing.
Two young professionals from New York, who asked not to be named, have travelled 160 kilometres to Philadelphia over several weekends to volunteer for Democrat Obama's campaign.
Philadelphia is the biggest city in Pennsylvania, which has emerged as one of the key battleground states in this election. Both candidates have focused a lot of attention here, as they have in other important states such as Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado.
According to figures released by Obama's campaign in Pennsylvania, their volunteers have so far knocked on 2 million doors and made 3.8 million phonecalls, as well as organized 6,000 events since June. The exact number of volunteers could not be determined because it changes on a daily basis.
The McCain campaign's Pennsylvania office said they could not give figures, but noted that some days 'hundreds' of people turned up to make calls.
On one recent Saturday morning, the two professionals from New York travelled to northeastern Philadelphia where Obama was speaking at a rally. They arrived at Obama's campaign headquarters, where scores of young volunteers were receiving instructions on how to get out the vote.
The two were asked to call on undecided voters, so they got into a car with a long list of addresses of potential voters. They started in a working class, Roman Catholic neighbourhood.
'Last weekend I knocked on some one hundred doors. It was tough,' one of them said.
It isn't easy to find people home on a Saturday. Those who are in often don't want to open the door - they get a leaflet about Obama in their mailbox.
Some do heed the doorbell. At one grey apartment block, a lady looks out of her window to see who the caller is.
'We want to know if you're going to vote,' the volunteer says.
'Yes, yes, for Obama,' the woman replies as she closes her window.
The answers are usually short and there are no questions asked about what each of the candidates actually intends to do. The longest conversation the two volunteers had was with a woman in her 40s, who was relaxing outside her house with a cup of coffee.
'I would have voted for Hillary Clinton, but now I don't know. The truth is I'm not really involved in politics,' she says.
The volunteer tries to convince her to vote for Obama, who is a Democrat like Clinton.
'Oh, is Hillary a Democrat?,' the woman asks.
Others do not need to talk, or even to open the door. One voter who is listed as undecided has clearly changed his status - he has signs with the names of McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin on his front yard and fence. The volunteers say there is no need to ring that doorbell.
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Older Talkback
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Are you kidding,you are only inducing feelings of paranoia within the minds of the voters by smear without any substance.The stench of the neocon extreme right is overwhelming in your post as it tries to smear both Obama and the press.You petend Obama is a radical and at the same time you accuse the press of not uncovering that,not doing it's work ,simply beause they have nothing to corroborate your smear .Haven't we seen enough of those vile tactics before?
They were used by the Nazis in their anti semitic campaign in the thirties before the GOP did.Goebbels accused the Jews of owning Germany ,at the same time accusing the free press of being owned by the Jews for refusing to acknoledge that smear.
The low road taken by the McCain campaign goes against everything he pr
eomessed ,the neocon disciples of Karl Rove are running his campaign.A vote for McCain is simply a vote for eight more years of degrading democracy .
Obama is so un-American,he want to change the bill of rigts,the constitution,if elected he will abolish elections and proclaim himself President for life like is friends Chavez and Morales in south America.
'Are you kidding,you are only inducing feelings of paranoia within the minds of the voters by smear without any substance.'
Archives prove Obama was a New Party member:
Thomas Lifson
Another piece in the puzzle of Barack Obama has been revealed, greatly strengthening the picture of a man groomed by an older generation of radical leftists for insertion into the American political process, trading on good looks, brains, educational pedigree, and the desire of the vast majority of the voting public to right the historical racial wrongs of the land.
The New Party was a radical left organization, established in 1992, to amalgamate far left groups and push the United States into socialism by forcing the Democratic Party to the left. It was an attempt to regroup the forces on the left in a new strategy to take power, burrowing from within. The party only lasted until 1998, when its strategy of 'fusion' failed to withstand a Supreme Court ruling. But dissolving the party didn't stop the membership, including Barack Obama, from continuing to move the Democrats leftward with spectacular success.
Obama's career bears many signs of being helped along by the radical left. At the critical moment when he entered electoral politics, he was part of a movement to take over an established political party and direct it to the task of building a socialist America.
IT IS TRUE, HE WAS A MEMBER OF THE SOCIALIST PARTY IN CHICAGO.
Since 2001, Bill Wade has been deployed nine times.
He had three tours of varying lengths in Iraq and also has served elsewhere in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, and in parts of Africa.
Yet it was the Army captain's last 18 months on active duty that solidified his support for John McCain.
Wade, now 33, was a congressional liaison officer for a year and a half that spanned the shift from Republican to Democratic control of Congress after the 2006 election. He wasn't impressed with what he saw.
'There really is not much difference in their tactics and their methodologies,' Wade said. 'Both parties were just fundamentally [broken] and beholden to their special interests.
'By the time the surge idea came up, Iraq was a horribly mismanaged war. All the politicians were running for the exit. McCain was the guy that said, 'Look, this is broke and we need to fix it.'
'He stood up to the Bush White House and Secretary [of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld, and I saw that as a true act of courage on his part. . . . And the surge has proven to be a tremendous success.'
Wade was being interviewed on a chilly Friday morning in Scranton, just outside the McCain Victory office on Lackawanna Avenue. It was the first stop on a two-day bus tour that had Wade and three other veterans out to encourage McCain supporters and win over Democrats and independents from the anthracite coal regions to the southeast.
Three of the four vets have strong Democratic roots. Retired Air Force Col. George 'Bud' Day, 83, a Medal of Honor recipient and McCain's first cellmate in Vietnam, recalls coming home from World War II and working for Harry S. Truman's reelection. Gina Savini, 45, is a South Philly native, the daughter of an Italian immigrant and, on her mother's side, the fourth generation to serve in the U.S. Navy. She calls her family 'very Democratic,' though many of its members, including Savini, have changed their registration.
Wade refers to himself as an 'Irish-Catholic Democrat and McCain supporter.' The leadership and courage the former POW has shown, both in the military and while serving in Congress, make him an easy sell for Wade, who is now a reservist and small-business owner. But Democratic leaders helped push Wade away, too.
'The Democratic Party I grew up in is not the same party of Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi,' Wade said. 'When Harry Reid said the war was lost, that was a kick in the stomach to me.' Reid made those remarks while Wade was working in the Capitol.
'What I learned from that experience down in D.C. was that we don't have leaders in Washington. We have politicians,' Wade said. 'A politician will say whatever he has to say to get reelected, and McCain has proven time and time again that he is a profile in courage.
'McCain stood up to the Bush White House on detainee torture, on Guantanamo Bay. He stood up against his own party and was berated, and imploded his presidential campaign over immigration reform. Whether you agree with him or not, he took a stand.
'Where has Barack Obama ever stood up for anything? Where has he stood against his party?'
Wade is as ready for change as anyone, but not in just any direction.
'Change is a beautiful thing, but what's behind the word change? What are we getting from Obama? It seems to be unknown. At least with John McCain, his life has been an open book. You know where he comes from, you know where he stands, you know where he's going.'
Wade questions whether 'career politicians' such as Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. can alter the status quo.
'As a small-town small-business owner, I can't relate to a Harvard lawyer or a career politician. I just don't see anything that they bring to the table that is going to change Washington.'
Wade worries about Biden's recent comments about Obama's inexperience inviting a crisis. He drew a parallel to Nikita Khrushchev's early assessment of President John F. Kennedy.
'Khrushchev took away from that summit that this guy's weak, he's young, he's inexperienced. And it emboldened the Soviets to put nuclear missiles in Cuba.
'At that time, John McCain was sitting on the USS Enterprise in a cockpit worrying that we were walking into a nuclear war. You can't buy that kind of experience.'
A lack of experience in the White House, Wade believes, led to the mismanagement of the Iraq war. He doesn't want to see Americans make the same mistake twice.
'Obama's a decent family man and a beautiful orator,' Wade said. But with two wars to win and an economic crisis to overcome, 'I don't think it's time to roll the dice.'
Of course the war was mismanaged, and non-military types rake in millions, but we need to think more than twice about geting back into battles with every country that might harbor insurgents. That would be never ending. Iraq to begin with was a major mistake, and look where it got us. We need someone who can help turn this economy around and not someone who's main objective is war. Bush failed on the military and he didn't surround himself with people who knew any more than he did, but I feel that Obama is an intelligent man who won't make those mistakes. He will make sure he has the best advice for the situation. Don't discredit him because he wasn't in the military. I have second thoughts about McCain's continued physical and mental health, partly because of the suffering as a POW. It's bound to take it's toll as he ages, and we can't take that chance with the incompetent Palin waiting in the wings.
'We need someone who can help turn this economy around and not someone who's main objective is war.'
You don't turn the economy around by raising taxes in a recession... You cause a depression that way... Every time.
some guy is giving one big tax cut the other guy is uncle scrooge-yet over the decades trillions to bankers space shttles advisors rich politicians media barons oil companies on and on day after day i take my hat of to obama-a guy who saw as a small boy-all the peace and love means nothing when the difference between rich and poor is so great-your country has plenty of money you will still be in iraqfor another 16 months.it really looked embaressing to see father xmas obama and uncle scrooge mcain talking about standing up and fight-i woder if he would of cut the soldiers pay and let them fight like beggars.
the only reason he picked palin was that he knows if she was running for president she would do much better than him-let him go to his grave thinking-if i act like uncle scrooge they will still love me becuase im married to a billionaire
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Obama a member of the socialist partyNov 2nd, 2008 - 04:42:13
During his first campaign for the Illinois state senate in 1995-96, Barack Obama was a member of, and was endorsed by, the far-left New Party. Obama’s New Party ties give the lie to his claim to be a post-partisan, post-ideological pragmatist. Particularly in Chicago, the New Party functioned as the electoral arm of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). So despite repeated attempts to distance himself from ACORN, Obama’s New Party ties raise disturbing questions about his links to those proudly militant leftists. The media’s near-total silence on this critical element of Obama’s past is deeply irresponsible.
While a small group of bloggers have productively explored Obama’s New Party ties, discussion has often turned on the New Party’s alleged socialism. Was the New Party actually established by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)? Was the New Party’s platform effectively socialist in content? Although these debates are both interesting and important, we needn’t resolve them to conclude that the New Party was far to the left of the American mainstream. Whether formally socialist or not, the New Party and its ACORN backers favored policies of economic redistribution. As Obama would say, they wanted to spread the wealth around. Bracketing the socialism question and simply taking the New Party on its own terms is sufficient to raise serious questions about Obama’s political commitments — questions that cry out for attention from a responsible press.
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