Word of the Day

Guess today's word! It can be used in a lot of different ways, and it often refers to poor bowel movement/constipation.

The Final Countdown

This'll be something like comprehensive, both of the the recent news from Nevada and the general future of Nevada. As I sit here, we are now 59.5 hours from Caucus Time. It's a little weird knowing that the fate of the world potentially hangs on what the 200 or so staffers here in the Silver State are able to accomplish over that time. Hyperbole? Yep. Also, Nope. Iowa got the car moving, this is where it could turn.

I've gotten about 5 hours of sleep per night for the last week. Maybe more like 4.5. So as I write this, I'm more than a little delirious. I would say that the circles around my eyes and my generally drawn and pale appearance are indicative of a second or third day zombie. I'm not quite rotting yet, but I could certainly use some brains. Mine be all used up.

As part of the final stage, I took over a section of turf all on my very own. It's been a wild experience, tracking vote goals, targeting areas strategically, managing resources... Wild but incredibly fun and rewarding.

Speaking of wild, this is the Wild Wild West. After the ol' standards of IA and NH, NV has proven to be something of a free for all. The elbows, all carefully concealed, are flying at us from all corners. They'd be snapped up in a flurry of controversy in any other early state, but it's all fresh and new here. One example:

After long and deliberate negotiations last March, which resulted in the creation of so-called "At Large Precincts," a system was developed and approved to allow shift workers within a certain radius of the Strip to vote at designated caucus locations on the Strip, rather than their own residential precincts, thus potentially expanding the voter base by a significant proportion. This was partially accomplished through the heft of Culinary Workers Union Local 226, one of NV's largest and arguably most powerful Unions, representing some 60,000 people across the state. On January 9th, after extensive deliberations and a little bit of careful suspense, the 226 endorsed...wait for it...wait for it...

Barack Obama!

Along with the endorsement came some significant benefits: Union members have hit the ground hard, organizing, educating and invigorating. It remains to be seen what the endorsement will translate into for votes, but it can’t be a bad thing to get that kinda muscle behind us.

But I digress. Back to the silliness: Just days after the endorsement, a group that includes the Nevada State Teacher’s Association has sued to stop the At-Large precincts from voting. For more on this particular storyline, I refer you to some things others have written, as I am not expert on these matters.

From the local and national Press:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/01/12/post_271.html?hpid=topnews

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/347382_joel15.html?source=mypi

(Make sure you check out the links to the flyers on this one. Very direct. Welcome to the Silver State. They don’t mince words around here.)

From the Union:
http://www.lasvegassun.com/blogs/ralstons-flash/2008/jan/15/culinary-takes-hillary-clinton-fliers/

(Make sure you check out the links to the flyers on this one. Very direct. Welcome to the Silver State. They don’t mince words around here.)
(Update: this didn’t go up last night due to massive internet failure. I hear someone kinked one of those tubes the info goes through. Anyway, the suit was dismissed this morning. I don’t doubt an appeal has already been filed, but so far the rules stand as established.)

In other news, I'm personally preparing to die. The office is something like a giant petri dish, and I've had a vicious cold for the last week. Although its unpleasantness level has faded dramatically, it’s still causing me to cough my lungs up approximately once every 3 minutes. At this stage it's more of an annoyance than anything else, thankfully. Still, coupled with a lack of anything resembling a full night's sleep, it certainly contributes to my Zombie-in-the-making appearance. And the impending 40 hour day that starts Friday morning and ends when I pass out Saturday night (after, no doubt, crying heavily, regardless of outcome) certainly threatens to add to the general chaos. I plan to sleep through my birthday Sunday. Speaking of which, if you’re inclined to call me on my birthday, please, for the love of god, don’t do it until after 3pm.

But it's all worth it, really. I've heard some people, even amongst you, my faithful (and few) readers, express doubts about the man I am killing myself to nominate. Whatever those reservations, I swear to you this is the real deal. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet. I guess, of course, that also applies to this, which you are, doubtless, reading on the internet...

Anyway, you'll hear from me Sunday, probably. But you'll hear from Nevada Saturday afternoon. Keep an eye on the news, cross your fingers, light a candle, pray, telepathically or technologically send me everything you can spare, because I'm gonna need it.

Speaking of getting a little extra, here's a nice moment, to remind me why I'm actively trying to kill myself on this guy's behalf. Definitely one of the more surreal moments of my time here...


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Forward. Always forward. It's 12:50am, I got to work at 7:30 this morning. Tomorrow, the the workday drops at 8am. Now I'm going to go home, to sleep. The alarm'll go off... Another 18 hour day tomorrow, 2 hours of sleep, back at the office at 4:30am Friday, and..

Once more, into the breach.

Why Disco Stu Doesn't Advertise

It's easy to get swept up in a moment. We went from stalled, to moving, to nervous, to fired up, to jubilant, and yes, almost even to the brink of complacent. Too much time smiling, not enough time staring one, simple truth in the face:

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation…want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

The thing I take away tonight is that there was only one lightning strike, so far. It was bright. It was beautiful. It made us look up again, for the first time in years, and wonder at the sky. But we also can't forget about the ground.

There was a book I had when I was a kid, "Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain." The farmer watches the cloud build over his dry land, standing on one leg, leaning on a spear. The cloud builds, but it won't break. He sees the lightning. But the cloud is impotent. It won't break. Not till he throws the spear into it. Then the rain falls.

We've spent these long years watching the world around us grow darker. We slowly slumped, our heads watching only our feet as we shuffled. We needed the lightning of Iowa to make us look to the sky again. But in the end, lightning only lights the dark so we can see how thirsty the land is. It breaks the shadow so we can see cracked earth, the dry crops, the dessicated trees. But in the lightning we see only a heap of broken images. The cloud never lifts until the rain comes. Until the cloud breaks, we'll never see the sun. In the lightning, we see flashes. And when the lightning fades, if we were watching, we know what we didn't know before. We don't need lightning, we need rain.

10 minutes after Barack left the stage tonight, I had fielded 7 calls. People calling to tell us to keep our chins up. People I've been chasing for weeks without success, now asking if they can come to volunteer tomorrow. One woman called. She was in a wheelchair, she told me, but she could sit on a corner and hold a sign. She could make phone calls, if there was a ramp to get into the office. She said to me, "I was undecided between Obama and Hillary, but that speech just made up my mind. What he said, you know. Even though he lost? That sealed it for me."

It's been awfully dark lately. Too dark to look at anything but the ground, for fear of stumbling in the shadow. The lightning last Thursday made us look up. We saw the cloud building, we saw the possibility of rain, our throats burned suddenly, and we watched the shadows, remembering the light. Tonight, a dry wind blew across our open lips, parching our tongues. Tonight, we looked again and saw not what was waiting, but what is. We saw power scratch. We saw power bite, claw, kick, cry and scream. And power has a way of holding things back. Power has a way of keeping us in our place, of telling us that we're better off keeping dreams hidden, our heads down. But we also tasted a raindrop. At least those of us on the ground, here in the real, true, non-metaphor desert in Nevada tasted it.

Have you smelled rain in the desert? There's nothing like it. The first drops taste like dust. But if it keeps falling, it washes everything clean. It pushes the dust down. It makes the grass stand. And in the night, after the rain, the crickets sing.

One of the students sent me a text message, at 7:59, local time. It said:

"It's not over yet! But I promise to work as hard as possible to change our future!"

It's starting to rain, in the desert, but it's not enough yet. Power concedes nothing without a demand. The demand now is that we risk what we've settled for to gain what we dream of. This is our chance. So keep your hand steady and your eye fixed. Grip your spear. Aim for the cloud. Throw.

Early Results...

Recently, trying to expand on a theme, Mrs. Clinton worked on refining the concepts she first voiced when accusing certain unnamed opponents of raising "false hope." I'll avoid any serious commentary about the nature of her newest ploy, and note only that she apparently believes hope is somehow suspect. In defending her position opposing the one thing left in Pandora's box, she took an interview request from FoxNews (courting that far left organization's supporter base). During her discussion, she dropped this depth charge into the Primary Sea: “Dr King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the civil rights act of 1964… That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said ‘we’re going to do it,’ and actually got it done.” (NOT paraphrased.)

Hmmm. Bill Clinton may have "gone with more black women than Barack," as Clinton supporter and civil rights icon Andrew Young claimed not long ago. Not in the best taste, to be sure. Similarly, in the taste department, I believe deriding the single most important and universally beloved figure in the history of the civil rights movement as a purveyor of empty hope may not be the best route for Mrs to take. Perhaps she should learn to use Google's new Cultural Sensitivity Map. I mean, I'm no scientist, but I'm pretty sure if you want people to like you should generally say NICE things about cultural heroes.

Meanwhile, in early results...
For those who aren't fully up to date with the rules that govern the nation's constitutionally mandated first primary (mandated in the NH constitution, that is), towns with a total population fewer than 100 people may open at midnight and close as soon as all registered voters have cast ballots. Two towns traditionally cast the first ballots in the nation: Dixville Notch and Hart's Location. In Dixville Notch, with 100% of the vote counted, the results stand:

Obama - 7
Edwards - 2
Richardson - 1


I'm not a mathematician, but I'm pretty sure 0% is not good, even if only 10 people are voting. Hart's Location had a slightly different take. 100% of vote counted, the results stand:

Obama - 9
Clinton - 3
Edwards - 1


I guess all things considered that's a pretty good result, comparatively.

So as of this moment, roughly 01:42am local time, the results from the NH Primary stand

O - 69.6%
E - 13%
C - 13%
R - 4.4%

As my old friend Disco Stu once said, "If these trends continue... heeeeey."

In any case, there's a lot of voting and counting left to do. But it's always nice when you go to bed with a little good news.

And We're Going to New Hampshire, and South Carolina, And...

The blogosphere is going nuts. Declarations of earthquakes. Declarations of a sea change. Mitt Romney referenced Barack Obama in the GOP New Hampshire debate last night, and followed it promptly with a claim that he, The King of Swinging Opinion, is the candidate of change. The repubs were falling all over themselves trying to prove which of them was the MOST like Barack Obama. My problem is that they called the race at 6:24 PST, which means I was still in the office when the word came down. Blake (not my dad) and I frantically scanned the FM and AM dials on the 30 minute drive to the party site, but were unable (?) to find a single channel with commentary. When we arrived, the room was wall to wall. Everyone wanted a hug or a high five. Most were close to crying if they hadn't already, and the rest teared up when Barack finally started talking. I sure did. I think it was when Barack gave a shout out to a bunch of 20-something kids who organized Iowa for him. It's something he does everywhere he goes in Iowa. Brings the Field Staff onstage, introduces them to the crowd, acknowledges their role, sets them loose on the undecideds who're silly enough to raise their hands. And everyone says it's all well and good and shows how much he understands the importance of ground game, and what a down to earth guy he is, and wow, that Barack sure does know how to organize. But you don't recognize your grunt laborers when you're claiming the most improbable electoral victory in modern history. So that's about when I started tearing up. Most of the girls were leaking when he gave the shout out to Michelle. I could go on and on about the assorted ramifications of the Iowa results. I could discuss the metrics and the implications, but you can read those on everyone else's blog. Or the NYT. But I got an email from my aunt the other day. She said,

"So, hey, a story on NPR about the Iowa Obama campaign said that one of its innovations was designating dozens coordinators to work specifically with groups of young people, which was a large reason for the high turnout of young voters. Very smart. Is that true in other states? Is that what you’re doing in Nevada?" And the answer is yes. I told a group of them yesterday, "Some people said we were wasting our time on young people." They didn't care much for that. It's been incredible to see the way they respond. One of my best student interns went home his first day with the policy pack I give them all. Some read it, but it usually takes a week. He texted me an hour later. When we were first talking, he told me about an election that they had to run for government class. Groups of four had to develop a platform and run against each other. His text said something like, "hey, just finished the policy. A lot of it is like the stuff we came up with for school. Especially with education."

I think it took him a week or so to realize that most of what Barack wants is actually common sense. He's a precinct captain now, probably the youngest around at 17, and his precinct has gone from 54% to vote goal to 93%. I've got kids who spend 12 hour days over their Christmas break making phone calls, knocking on doors... One of them asked me yesterday if she could come here to hang out and finish her homework.

We're getting over giddy, finally, and getting ready for a fight. It's still the wild west out here. Most of the time, the conversation goes something like, "If Obama wins NH, he'll go on to South Carolina with a great deal of momentum." Or they'll say, "After NH, the third important contest will be in South Carolina..." It's funny that no one realizes we're here. They'll be waking up on Wednesday morning and see that their ticket says "Nevada" and then this town'll turn into a zoo. But we're ready. Ready to play our role. I guess I'm mostly saying that you shouldn't expect to hear from me much till the 20th. Watch for the red shirts on the news, and you might even catch a glimpse of me waving a sign behind some CNN camera. So see ya after the 19th. Let's hope that I have a very happy birthday, turning 29 the day Barack leaves with a victory in the West, on his way (at last) to South Carolina.

18 hours...

Or is it 18 hours? Probably by the time you read this, it'll be 10. Maybe 2. Maybe it already happened. I dunno.

Quick Campaign Update -

We are getting ready to shift gears, and hit the pavement hard to Get Out The Caucus. Check your local program listings for a Field Organizer or volunteer coming soon to a telephone or door near you (in NV).

Chris Matthews had this piece of completely objective, fact based reporting to do today:

“Every few generations, America makes up its mind to change things. We decide we`re in a rut. We decide to get ourselves out of that rut and we take the necessary leap. That`s what we did when we were stuck in the Great Depression in 1932 and picked Franklin Roosevelt. That`s what we did in 1952, when we were stuck in Korea and picked Dwight Eisenhower, what some of us did in 1980, when we were stuck with double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates and double-digit hostages stuck in Iran and chose Ronald Reagan.

Barack Obama on the eve of Iowa is the very name tonight, the very statement, the very being of the word "change." If I sit here tomorrow night reporting that he has won the Iowa caucuses, the world will hear it and the world will be stunned because the United States of America, despised by so many for lording it over the world these days, for dictating regional solutions by virtue of our military power, will be saying, No more. No more of invading countries. No more of dictating a war Americana. No more our way or the highway. No more Bush doctrine. No more Bush.”

Of course, it would be nice not to be compared to Reagan, but I'll take it. One of the guys in my office insists that it's an endorsement. I dunno, sounds like a pretty equitable and irrefutable statement of objective fact to me...

Tonight, all the candidates (with sufficient $$$) went on the air for 2 minutes in Iowa, in the middle of the evening news. Here's what Barack had to say.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/cdlookup

Seriously, if you're still not sold, you should really stop reading my blog by now.

As far as personally, the campaign higher ups are still mum on my possible addition to staff, which means I still don't know if I'm gonna have to cruise out of full time participation in order to look for gainful employ. Some of my student interns were shocked this evening at the concept that I don't get paid. They can't imagine an 80 hour week without financial compensation. It's hard to explain to a 16 year old exactly why it's worth it in terms they'll understand. I think, perhaps, you have to work a soul crushing job or two before you understand the value of doing something that makes you happy. Not that I can pay my rent with happy, but it sure would be nice to both be happy and pay bills. Hopefully it'll happen.

So wish us luck. If you try to call me for congratulations or condolences Thursday night, I'll probably either be screaming or crying or both, and in either case almost definitely drunk. So what I'm saying is don't bother. Call me Friday. Not that I'm asking you to call me, I'm just saying if you were predisposed to do so, don't do it till after tomorrow.

I'm off. Not sure I'll be able to sleep tonight, but here's hopin'...

The West Wing and Beyond

It's not every week that a former personal assistant to the President spends a week in the office, but that's what we had for about the last week. Ok, Ok, so she was the personal assistant to the imaginary President, but for those of us who spent 7 years in Aaron Sorkin's fantasyland, it was just like it. Kathryn Joosten, AKA Mrs Landingham, personal assistant to POTUS Josiah Bartlett. See a little video here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/michaelpipe/Cg25

If you look carefully, you can see me doing apparently nothing on the right side of the first shot. My hair's bleached, for those of you who haven't seen me in a while.


It's always nice when celebrities turn out to be decent, down to earth folks. The best moments were when Kathy scolded one of us. Mrs. Landingham, in the hizzy.
Discussing a midday, weekday canvass:

Graves: "Who can go out with us in the middle of a weekday? What is this, the senior, unemployed, deadbeat, actor/writer canvass?"

Kathy (looking over her glasses): "Well, once I'm done being an old, unemployed, deadbeat actor/writer, I'll go back to work in Hollywood and make tons and tons of money." Grin.

(Please note, this is a very inaccurate transcript. The statements made above are reconstructed, and any resemblance to actual conversation are purely coincidental)

But really, what's important is that there's finally something happening. And I don't mean the DMR poll http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071231/NEWS09/71231044)

or about Kucinich's semi-endorsement http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2008/01/01/politics/horserace/entry3664667.shtml

I am in fact talking about the reality that, in a very short time, we will have an actual vote. Well, not really a vote. A result, though. I don't know when exactly you'll be reading this, so I won't say how many hours or days it is. I'll just let you see for yourself: http://www.barackobama.com/flash/iowacountdown.swf

Come 48 hours from the moment at which I commit this to paper, someone will have been declared a winner.

If you want to know who it should be, and you somehow haven't decided yet, please, go here. Hell, go here anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmUUYo9o9eg

If you're still thinking about voting for someone else, I'm very, very sorry.