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enchantingly For a long time I was not sure if I would campaign for Obama this year. I was fairly complacent about the election; Romney was, I thought, a terrible candidate, and the Republicans had no ideas beyond giving further government assistance to an utterly unworthy investor class, which I felt could hardly be a winner at the ballot box. Obama had proven utterly useless on obvious issues such as the protection of citizens against the surveillance state – issues where he actually needed no congressional approval to act, and could not blame Republicans. On other issues, such as the increasing gap between rich and poor, he had achieved nothing at all, in large part due to an obstructionist Republican party that has no other principle than this, that those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away from them. But Obama hardly seemed to do congressional campaigning, so he was himself in large part to blame for a Republican congress. He didn’t seem to have the inner hatred of human greed that probably would be the only motive force capable of saving this country.

But if Obama did not hate greed enough, his opponent undoubtedly did not hate it at all, and would probably be hard-put to explain what in the world Paul meant when he said, “The love of profit is the source of all evil.” To such men the word “evil” there must be a Biblical typo for “good.” The closeness of the election made it clear that some action was advisable, for people like me who could, to support the man who was far and away the better candidate for the office of president. I was helped by a good friend who kept on me about it, and who felt passionately what I felt more generally, that to be neutral in this case was no virtue. He was working full-time, and decided to use his very limited vacation time to volunteer in the campaign. It turned out that two more friends were able to volunteer as well, and so off we went to Ohio the Friday before the election.

There was a friendly house putting us up in Shaker Heights, where we would be volunteering. I was curious to see the area. In college I quickly learned that members of the Ivy League overclass who said they were from “Cleveland” were actually from Shaker Heights. I thought it would be merely the rich suburb, but it was more complicated than that: it was more like Westchester, which combines fabulous wealth with occasional grit (Mount Vernon, in Westchester, produces rappers).

Shaker Heights sits on a ridge of land a few miles away from downtown Cleveland. As is typical in American residential geography, the low ground beneath Shaker Heights in the direction of downtown Cleveland is almost entirely black and poor.

Obama had several campaign offices in the area, the most important of which was in Shaker Square, a nice octagon of shops where the commuter rail stop was. It became our work headquarters for the next few days. There were also two satellite offices I spent time in down the hill in the black neighborhoods. In general, Shaker Square was the perfect location for an Obama campaign office, with access to both of the Democratic party’s bases: minorities and college-educated whites.

I had volunteered in 2008 in Pennsylvania, and been at the inauguration in 2009. As at those times, I was amazed at the diversity of Obama supporters: there were people of every race and financial profile. I was knocking on doors, doing grunt work – but so was a surgeon from Seattle. A lot of the volunteers were young, but almost as many were old. And besides the volunteers, some people in the office had apparently just come in to get warm, or to be around other people. They were allowed to sit there and munch on food people brought. They just needed someplace to go. They were part of the reason we were there, anyway.

Once upon a time in the land of Us...

The campaign office in Shaker Square was large, bright, and full of activity. There were nice posters on the walls, many of them handmade, but in general there wasn’t much attention paid to décor. Junk of various sorts had accumulated in the months since it had opened (there was a May 2012 calendar still on the wall). There was a table of food and drink brought in by people. The food appeared to be purely pot luck – there was no oversight as to what would be there, it was whatever came in the door. People were coming in and out all day long, to volunteer their time or bring food or visit. There would generally be at least twenty people in the office, half volunteers and half staff, and at times there must have been a hundred or more. There were a few campaign coordinators running the show, all women, and all incredibly competent and caring. They were constantly busy, but there was a good supply of volunteers, so they did not appear stressed, just busy. They gave out tasks and the tasks got done, more or less in accordance with instructions, it seemed. There was also a bank of computers and people working on them. I didn’t know quite what they were doing, but it all seemed to work very well.

When I volunteered in 2008, “hope” was one of the catchwords, and that feeling of hope had unfortunately mostly departed. This time around fear had become a strong motivating factor, the fear that a venture capitalist with venture capitalist values could really ascend to the White House. Buses driving around Cleveland said, ROMNEY ECONOMICS: WRONG FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS and DON’T LET THEM TAKE US BACK. Fear was particularly noticeable in the office several days before the election; in the day or two before the election people were too busy to be afraid. But it reminded me of one of my mother’s sayings, that we don’t work to make the world better: we work to keep it as good as it is. In other words, do good and don’t expect to turn the world on its head. Good isn’t necessarily transformative, it’s just good.

Forward, not back.

One thing counterbalanced the fearful and somewhat gloomy atmosphere, and that was the sense that for this week Cuyahoga County was the center of the entire nation. Almost all the prognosticators agreed that Ohio was the most important of the swing states, and Cuyahoga County was the single most important part of the state for Obama. Supposedly in 2008 Obama had lost the rest of Ohio, but his margin in Cuyahoga County had won the state for him. He absolutely needed Cuyahoga County to get to the polls.

As a result of this fact, volunteers had poured in to this particular campaign office from all over the country: I met people from New York, New Jersey, D.C., California, Texas, and Washington state. And celebrities showed up as well. Some of them were politicos I knew nothing about (the mayor of Sacramento? The mayor of Minneapolis?), and some were celebrities I knew nothing about (John Legend was the talk of the office, but I had never heard of him before), but others I knew (Jesse Jackson, Don King). Many of these visitors gave inspirational speeches. Jackson was particularly eloquent, though perhaps a bit of a windbag. The audience these people created by speaking was then used by the volunteers: one man in particular spoke very movingly about the fact that he would not have gotten health insurance – due to a preexisting condition – and a later operation without Obama. The important visitors and the personal testimonials alike gave the sense that something was at stake.

I felt I simply had to get a picture with Don King, who was one of the crazy figures of New York City in the 1980s – in fact it was almost amazing to see that he was in fact a real person. His hair is not quite as extravagant as it used to be, but in general he looked to be very well preserved for someone who had organized such events as “the Rumble in the Jungle” and “the Thrilla in Manila,” which now seem like ancient history. His age was mostly shown by the fact that he did not move very much. His outfit was completely insane (a friend said “it looked like an American flag exploded on him”): maroon pants, a white shirt, and a washed denim jacket which looked like it belonged to an eight-foot-tall Debbie Gibson in the 1980s. This jacket had an American flag in red, white, and blue sequins on its back, as well as numerous Americana pins and buttons, some of them Obama-related. King also sported an American flag tie. Some people wondered at my desire to have my picture taken with him – flavorful as he was, there was nothing particularly savory about King. Mike Tyson said of him, “He is a wretched, slimy, reptilian motherfucker.  This is supposed to be my ‘black brother,’ right? He’s just a bad man, a real bad man. He would kill his own mother for a dollar. He’s ruthless, he’s deplorable, he’s greedy, and he doesn’t know how to love anybody.” King had been convicted on two separate occasions of manslaughter, once because he had stomped a man to death over $600 he was owed. He looked quite fit at age 81 and will probably die in his bed as all bad men seem to.  But goodness does not come from holding other people at arm’s length. If the right people had approached me at the wrong time, I am quite certain I would have been capable of killing them. And I cannot deny that somehow Don King’s personality had added something to my life, in his own strange way, just as he brightened up the office just by being there. I do not pretend to really understand this.

The carnival atmosphere the celebrities brought to the office sometimes made me wish I could just stay at headquarters to see them all. But the work was fun in its own way. We were doing “get out the vote” work – not trying to persuade people to vote a certain way, but just trying to get them to vote. And the work had been prepped beautifully. We were given lists, in each area, of unlikely voters: people who were registered but who for various reasons the Obama campaign did not feel it could rely on. I don’t know how they figured out who the unlikely voters were, but frequently they were young and recently registered. They were not campaign contributors – you could rely on the campaign contributors to vote. So often we were walking past homes with Obama signs, but not knocking on their doors – we were headed for the homes with no political signs at all.

The level of political engagement, I have to say, was very impressive. I have never lived in a swing state, so really I had never seen anything quite like this. In presidential elections a few states become the focus of millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of attention, and it was visible there in Ohio. Added to this was the extraordinary power of identity politics. We all know that this is a major factor – almost the factor – in elections, and so we expect Giuliani to have powerful support in the New York Italian-American community, for instance. But here it was on a level I really had never seen before. Because blacks have been driven into ghettoes for all of American history, there are no neighborhoods as ethnically uniform as black communities, and since there is such a history of political exclusion and subjugation in the black community, nowhere in America does the chance to hold political power seem to have such meaning. And the Obama campaign had trained its laser beams on black neighborhoods in swing states for five years now. It seemed like we were knocking on every other door in every neighborhood – the only homes we were passing were the ones with Obama signs already there. And there was no question who the people were voting for. The only questions were the practical ones: how early voting worked, where the polls were, what to bring to the polls, what to do if you had moved, whether you had to register every year, how late the polls were open, whether there were rides for the sick and the old. And those were questions we could answer.

Down by the Board of Elections on Sunday.

People lined up to vote.

Of course most of the time people weren’t home, or maybe wouldn’t answer an unexpected knock at the door. But we left on unanswered doors literature which helped answer those questions, and so it seemed in general like significant work. And since we were armed with cars, on several occasions I personally drove people to the polls: due to early voting, I could do this before Election Day itself. This was encouraged because there were fears that lines would be long on Election Day, and if some problems arose – insufficient I.D., or a contested vote – there was still time in the subsequent days to solve the problem. (This was perhaps ill-advised, as there were not nearly the kind of facilities for early voting as there were for regular voting, but the early voting station down at the Board of Elections was an impressive scene: massive lines, political speeches, the giant mayor of Cleveland striding around in an expensive suit and overcoat presiding over everything, people giving out free coffee and barbecue). Driving people to the polls took a great deal of time, but it was fun and there were several instances when I was uncertain if the person would have gotten to the polls any other way. On Election Day I drove a mother with her young children who did not have a car, and seeing how far away her polling place was I was not at all certain she would have gotten there without someone driving her. My saintly politically engaged friend from New York found a black woman in her 70s who was registered but had never voted, so he gave her the limo treatment and brought her to the polls. I don’t think we were authorized to do the driving ourselves – maybe there are insurance problems with all this – but we didn’t care too much. It was fun talking to people on the drive, and it was fun seeing the deal closed this way. As a former teacher, I always get frustrated not knowing if anything good ever quite comes of what I do – in this instance, I was trying to get people to vote, and it was nice to see it actually happening. And I left with the sense that you could, in fact, if you invested the time, make votes happen which otherwise might not. This could be seen as a flaw in the system, but I didn’t feel that way: a conviction for which you are willing to give time and effort should be a multiplier.

Race was of course another element in the whole experience. The racial divide in this country is so strong, that I cannot deny that there is something strange and exciting about crossing it from time to time, and being with people on the other side. I could feel that it was strange and exciting for the people on the other side as well. I felt that most of the living rooms I visited hadn’t been visited too often by a bearded white guy who lives in the country, reads the Bible frequently, and drives a pickup. I couldn’t claim there was much deep connecting going on, but I think we were all aware that even superficial interaction across these lines didn’t happen often. In fact, the Obama campaign is one of the few places I’ve ever seen it happen with a real sense of equality on both sides. It feels different from the kind of racial “equality” you experience in educated circles, where it feels like an effort by whites in an unquestionably superior position to “include” and “tolerate” minorities. A voter is in some sense in the privileged position – he is the patron, and it takes some humility to come knocking on his door. And I was impressed, in general, how gracious people were to me: I was, in the end, a solicitor, but I was treated well everywhere except the last day, in one neighborhood near some public housing projects. There I had the familiar childhood feeling (from growing up in New York City in the 80s with all kinds of racial tension), that I was in some physical danger. There were some groups of young men hanging out by the corner store, and they wanted to hear nothing about voting. One man told me to forget about going on my round through the neighborhood: “You don’t need to worry about your papers. You need to worry about me. You hear me? You need to worry about me. Do you know what I’m saying?” This seemed like a situation I did not need to stay in, and I didn’t. Experience has told me that our instincts are good, but are only useful if we listen to them. Nearby I spoke with a woman who ran an “urban farm” in the neighborhood, where there had been fairly serious black/white friction. I felt it was pretty clear that the same animus against “urban farmers” – hipsters – was being directed my way.

Thank the Lord for Episcopalians and their churches.

There were so many volunteers beating the bushes that I could go at my usual slow pace without feeling any guilt. I had a fairly strong sense that I could be useful, but it really didn’t depend entirely on me. I walked a bit around Cleveland, saw some nice churches, marveled at the extraordinarily monumental downtown, tried to go to see a production of Moliere’s Misanthrope (it was sold out), and went to the gift shop of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (the place itself didn’t quite convince me to fork over the entrance fee). Saturday night the area celebrated Halloween, as the Hurricane had prevented many kids from going Trick-or-Treating, so I took some time to carve a Jack O’Lantern. Sometimes I just sat around the campaign office, enjoying being part of things.

The Kuhner 2012 Jack O'Lantern

We really did pound the pavement quite a bit on Election Day, making multiple passes through every neighborhood, and I went in to shops and told passersby to vote, and it was fun being intent on the goal. Indeed one of the great tasks in life is to create situations where only one thing matters; and Election Day was such a day. We had only one goal that day, and everything else simply dropped away. In life these are the notable hours. I have heard politicians talk warmly of campaigns, and when they reach their last campaign they speak sentimentally about them. This makes sense to me: in a campaign there is a single, simple purpose. For whatever reason, we are constituted to be energized by such a thing.

When the work was wrapping up around 7 p.m. we cleaned up the satellite office and then headed to an Election Night Party in someone’s house, where I did some damage to a bottle of good whiskey and watched the good news come in. When Ohio was called for Obama, and with it the election, we went out to the street and joined hands and danced in a circle, as if we were in the background of some Renaissance painting. We had worked for it, and it felt great. Some of the women glowed with all the inner satisfaction of revenge that the “legitimate rape” Senate candidates were defeated. I didn’t quite have the vindictiveness, but I will confess that I don’t have any particular sympathy for the “rape-is-God’s-will-but-progressive-taxation-is-not” Christians.

Some of the data I got later confirmed the sense of unanimity I had had on the beat: some of the black neighborhoods we had been working in did not cast a single vote for Romney. And why should they? Romney was not there to represent the needs and solve the problems of poor people. Any talk he might have about growing the economy was merely lies; by all data, economies with strong middle classes, progressive taxation, strong regulatory apparatus, and social safety nets do better than economies without all those things. Romney’s idea of a good economy is one where people like him make billions instead of mere hundreds of millions.

In the weeks following the election, I was surprised to hear from the media how much they thought this election was a repudiation of Republican policies, and how Republicans needed to change in order to win future elections. I thought Republicans did very well, considering how bad their candidates were. Romney was an unprincipled, lying, incompetent, awkward, one-term governor who stood for nothing except his own success: but he came within shouting distance of the presidency. The only thing I think his party learned was that they shouldn’t bother with candidates from the Northeast. And to shut up about requiring women to bear children for their rapists. As for talk about demographics, another way for the Republican Party to deal with this problem is simply to capture a larger percentage of white people’s votes. This is not an utterly implausible strategy, though as I cannot point to anything notably good the Republican Party has done for the country in the past twenty years, they will not have my vote anytime soon.

We drove home the day after the election, into a snowstorm which made driving quite difficult as we approached New York. It had been a great trip, really. Obama was the first candidate I ever campaigned for; I wonder if there will be another.