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Written by Maggie Wells
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In 2004, I was living in Marin County just North of San Francisco, one of the most liberal enclaves in the country, watching the Kerry-Bush campaign unfold. We felt that the election was Kerry’s to lose – there was no way Bush could be elected a second time.
But when you’re living among progressives, you always get the tiresome feeling of preaching to the choir. I had a great idea – what if everybody in Marin got up and moved to Ohio or Nevada or Florida, someplace where our votes would make a difference?
Then the call came from the Kerry campaign: and invitation to travel to one of the swing states and canvas. I packed up my two teenage sons, then 15 and 16 and flew to Ft. Lauderdale, the site of the butterfly-hanging-chad fiasco of 2000. We stood in traffic and waved signs, we carried water to people standing in long lines outside the courthouse waiting to vote, we walked the neighborhoods and helped people find their polling places, which had been changed at the last minute and misleading literature left on people’s doors.
I was excited to participate on the ground in a place where it mattered. And the people I met there were so inspiring, they came from all over, many from New York. I expected the Floridians to be impressed, inspired as well. But mostly they resented our presence.
In hindsight, how could they not? Now I live in Massachusetts, another hotbed of liberalism and how would I feel if my “neighbor” from Pennsylvania or Ohio showed up at my door to “help me find my way?”
Yesterday I received an email from the Obama campaign asking me to travel to Ohio to knock on doors in the One Million for Change canvass. I told them, no. Our efforts in Florida were seen as intrusive and arrogant. Obama supporters in Ohio need to carry the day. The rest of us can only sit by and cross our fingers.
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