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Sep. 9th, 2003 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivka(I tried to post about this last night, but LJ ate it. Trying again now.)
Yesterday![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
curiousangel and I went to a big Howard Dean rally on the University of Maryland campus. (Read news accounts here or here, or see pictures here.) I came home so simultaneously tired and excited that I had a hard time keeping my fingers on the keys as I tried to write it up. Wow.
We had volunteered to help distribute rally signs, so I left work early. On the shuttle from the College Park Metro we met another volunteer, a moderate Republican who works in media relations and is considering quitting her job to go volunteer at Dean campaign headquarters in Burlington. She'd brought her laptop to help register people to vote and sign them up with the campaign – apparently, rows of laptops are a standard feature at large Dean events, part of the whole wired-campaign vision.
The rally was held in a beautiful outdoor amphitheatre, with grassy tiers separated by low stone walls. There were already at least fifty of volunteers there, and the perimeter of the amphitheatre was lined with blue-and-white Dean rally signs. We signed in at the volunteer table and were given huge badges to wear around our necks: "{Maryland flag} for Dean Volunteer" Then we sat down in the brick plaza at the center of the amphitheatre and waited for a long time. Several other people from the Baltimore Meetups were there, and we had a good time hanging out, talking and watching the tiers fill up. An hour and a half before the rally was scheduled to start, hundreds of people were already there.
The organizers had ordered hundreds of rally signs. Their plan was to reserve the center plaza for people holding signs, to create a strong visual just in front of Dean for the cameras. Our job was to circulate through the crowd inviting people to come down to the front, trying to recruit a diverse sample: not just students, not just Birkenstock wearers, not just counterculture-looking people, not just established campaign volunteers, not just white folks.curiousangel stayed in the center plaza to make sure that everyone who entered had a Dean sign. When the center plaza was jammed full, we gave the rest of the signs out to whoever wanted to hold them from wherever they were sitting. The place was packed – campus police estimated 3,700 people and I absolutely believe it.
As seems to be standard at Dean events, the rally started a little bit late. They began the evening with "citizen speakers," random people who had left interesting comments when they signed up for the rally. There were four of them: a disability rights activist from Vermont, who talked about Vermont virtues and compared the Governor to Grade A maple syrup; an Asian-American Muslim businessman, who talked about his faith that Dean will help to bring peace in the Middle East and will preserve civil liberties at home; a deaf woman from Gallaudet University, who talked about equal access to education and pointed out that Dean's web-based campaign is especially accessible to people with disabilities; and an unemployed guy from the rural Eastern Shore of Maryland, who is a medic with his local volunteer fire department and who talked about Bush's economic record. Lots of cheers for the citizen speakers, especially the two men.
A group of College Republicans had set up on a plaza overlooking the amphitheatre, which gave them a lot of visibility for their numbers. The crowd easily drowned out their chants, so they started chanting while the speakers were talking and the crowd was trying to be quiet and listen. I thought it was particularly low-class of them to verbally heckle the deaf speaker, who couldn't hear what they were saying.
More speakers. They paraded 35 local and state politicians who are endorsing Dean: state senators and representatives, city council members, a couple of mayors. Thirty-five! There was no time for them to say anything – they just waved as their names were read. There was a speech by a Congressman from Arizona, who got a great call-and-response thing going about Bush's record: He'd call out an issue – education, health care, the environment – and he had the crowd chanting "Says one thing, does another!" People were getting pretty worked up. The finance director for the national campaign spoke briefly, and then introduced Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore, Dean of Howard University, and former college classmate of Howard Dean's. He said a few words about Dean's commitment to cities, and then introduced the candidate.
*swoon.*
Dean spoke for about twenty minutes. If you've heard or read his stump speech, you pretty much know what he said – but it was exciting to me anyway even though there wasn't much that was new. He's so goddamned charismatic. And he really connected well with the audience. For example, one of his common themes on the campaign trail has been that the Bush tax cuts are resulting in higher state and local taxes to make up for cuts in federal services. At the College Park speech, he made that argument concrete by talking about UM's 21% increase in in-state tuition this year. He also talked about his own feelings in college, when he realized that the government was lying and covering things up about the Vietnam War, and tied that in to his opposition to the Iraq War. The crowd was all-ages, but he'd tailored his speech to reach the students first.
He handled the hecklers well, and in the way that was probably the most likely to infuriate them. The first time they started chanting during his speech, he said "That's okay. Come next November, half of them are going to vote for me because they're worried about the budget and their tuition going up." The second time he smiled and said, "Let's give them a minute to get it out of their systems… a moment of silence for the GOP, which isn't going to be around much after November." He didn't seem at all rattled, and he got the crowd laughing at the protesters instead of being pissed off at them – which kept the positive energy going in a really great way.
He finished up with his standard close: "The biggest lie that people like me tell to people like you in an election year is, 'vote for me and I'll solve all your problems.' The truth is that YOU have the power to change this country. YOU have the power to change this party. YOU have the power to take this country back!" I was screaming. Everyone around me was screaming. I surged forward to try to shake his hand, but by the time I got to the crowd-control fence he'd moved on and I couldn't reach him. I got to see him from pretty close up, though, which was cool. I realized that I had completely lost my voice from all the shouting, and could only croak hoarsely. All the way home,curiousangel and I talked a mile a minute about politics and Dean and Dean and Dean.
The Dean people are really pushing outreach and campaign-building this month. Right now, more than 360,000 people have signed up to receive updates and information from the campaign. They're trying to grow that to 450,000 by the end of the month. I know that several people have told me that they're interested in Howard Dean or thinking of supporting his campaign. If you're leaning Deanward, I urge you to sign up right now with the campaign here.
Yesterday
curiousangel and I went to a big Howard Dean rally on the University of Maryland campus. (Read news accounts here or here, or see pictures here.) I came home so simultaneously tired and excited that I had a hard time keeping my fingers on the keys as I tried to write it up. Wow.We had volunteered to help distribute rally signs, so I left work early. On the shuttle from the College Park Metro we met another volunteer, a moderate Republican who works in media relations and is considering quitting her job to go volunteer at Dean campaign headquarters in Burlington. She'd brought her laptop to help register people to vote and sign them up with the campaign – apparently, rows of laptops are a standard feature at large Dean events, part of the whole wired-campaign vision.
The rally was held in a beautiful outdoor amphitheatre, with grassy tiers separated by low stone walls. There were already at least fifty of volunteers there, and the perimeter of the amphitheatre was lined with blue-and-white Dean rally signs. We signed in at the volunteer table and were given huge badges to wear around our necks: "{Maryland flag} for Dean Volunteer" Then we sat down in the brick plaza at the center of the amphitheatre and waited for a long time. Several other people from the Baltimore Meetups were there, and we had a good time hanging out, talking and watching the tiers fill up. An hour and a half before the rally was scheduled to start, hundreds of people were already there.
The organizers had ordered hundreds of rally signs. Their plan was to reserve the center plaza for people holding signs, to create a strong visual just in front of Dean for the cameras. Our job was to circulate through the crowd inviting people to come down to the front, trying to recruit a diverse sample: not just students, not just Birkenstock wearers, not just counterculture-looking people, not just established campaign volunteers, not just white folks.
curiousangel stayed in the center plaza to make sure that everyone who entered had a Dean sign. When the center plaza was jammed full, we gave the rest of the signs out to whoever wanted to hold them from wherever they were sitting. The place was packed – campus police estimated 3,700 people and I absolutely believe it.As seems to be standard at Dean events, the rally started a little bit late. They began the evening with "citizen speakers," random people who had left interesting comments when they signed up for the rally. There were four of them: a disability rights activist from Vermont, who talked about Vermont virtues and compared the Governor to Grade A maple syrup; an Asian-American Muslim businessman, who talked about his faith that Dean will help to bring peace in the Middle East and will preserve civil liberties at home; a deaf woman from Gallaudet University, who talked about equal access to education and pointed out that Dean's web-based campaign is especially accessible to people with disabilities; and an unemployed guy from the rural Eastern Shore of Maryland, who is a medic with his local volunteer fire department and who talked about Bush's economic record. Lots of cheers for the citizen speakers, especially the two men.
A group of College Republicans had set up on a plaza overlooking the amphitheatre, which gave them a lot of visibility for their numbers. The crowd easily drowned out their chants, so they started chanting while the speakers were talking and the crowd was trying to be quiet and listen. I thought it was particularly low-class of them to verbally heckle the deaf speaker, who couldn't hear what they were saying.
More speakers. They paraded 35 local and state politicians who are endorsing Dean: state senators and representatives, city council members, a couple of mayors. Thirty-five! There was no time for them to say anything – they just waved as their names were read. There was a speech by a Congressman from Arizona, who got a great call-and-response thing going about Bush's record: He'd call out an issue – education, health care, the environment – and he had the crowd chanting "Says one thing, does another!" People were getting pretty worked up. The finance director for the national campaign spoke briefly, and then introduced Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore, Dean of Howard University, and former college classmate of Howard Dean's. He said a few words about Dean's commitment to cities, and then introduced the candidate.
*swoon.*
Dean spoke for about twenty minutes. If you've heard or read his stump speech, you pretty much know what he said – but it was exciting to me anyway even though there wasn't much that was new. He's so goddamned charismatic. And he really connected well with the audience. For example, one of his common themes on the campaign trail has been that the Bush tax cuts are resulting in higher state and local taxes to make up for cuts in federal services. At the College Park speech, he made that argument concrete by talking about UM's 21% increase in in-state tuition this year. He also talked about his own feelings in college, when he realized that the government was lying and covering things up about the Vietnam War, and tied that in to his opposition to the Iraq War. The crowd was all-ages, but he'd tailored his speech to reach the students first.
He handled the hecklers well, and in the way that was probably the most likely to infuriate them. The first time they started chanting during his speech, he said "That's okay. Come next November, half of them are going to vote for me because they're worried about the budget and their tuition going up." The second time he smiled and said, "Let's give them a minute to get it out of their systems… a moment of silence for the GOP, which isn't going to be around much after November." He didn't seem at all rattled, and he got the crowd laughing at the protesters instead of being pissed off at them – which kept the positive energy going in a really great way.
He finished up with his standard close: "The biggest lie that people like me tell to people like you in an election year is, 'vote for me and I'll solve all your problems.' The truth is that YOU have the power to change this country. YOU have the power to change this party. YOU have the power to take this country back!" I was screaming. Everyone around me was screaming. I surged forward to try to shake his hand, but by the time I got to the crowd-control fence he'd moved on and I couldn't reach him. I got to see him from pretty close up, though, which was cool. I realized that I had completely lost my voice from all the shouting, and could only croak hoarsely. All the way home,
curiousangel and I talked a mile a minute about politics and Dean and Dean and Dean.The Dean people are really pushing outreach and campaign-building this month. Right now, more than 360,000 people have signed up to receive updates and information from the campaign. They're trying to grow that to 450,000 by the end of the month. I know that several people have told me that they're interested in Howard Dean or thinking of supporting his campaign. If you're leaning Deanward, I urge you to sign up right now with the campaign here.
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-10 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-10 04:52 am (UTC)One of the guys who's volunteering here for Dean is an Irish citizen - he's from Dublin, and doing a postdoc in the U.S. He told me he thinks that anything he can do here to influence American voters to defeat Bush will have more of a positive effect on the world than anything he can do with his ballot back home. So you're not the only one who's following this race closely without benefit of citizenship.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-10 05:14 am (UTC)Might sign up for Dean's email list if I'm not deluged - can you give me some idea of the traffic?
no subject
Date: 2003-09-10 05:30 am (UTC)It looks like I get one or two e-mails a day from the national campaign. I've signed up to get what they call the "Dean Daily Dose," which is a note every morning with Dean talking points, and then I also get a few messages a week from Joe Trippi (the campaign manager) or the campaign in general. They do acknowledge that the mail volume goes up for the last three weeks of every quarter, which is when they make their big fundraising pitch. The rest of the quarter, they're very careful not to try your patience.