And then something amazing happened
Look, I'm not saying that Howard Dean is the best thing that ever happened to politics or even that he's The One for the presidential election in November, but he's creating a movement and it's beyond the 'politics as gamesmanship' that seems to be all the media know how to talk about anymore.
In the last week, I've had a teenager, who's too young to vote, and his mother who came up to Iowa from Oklahoma and a couple of middle-aged men from Texas who've never worked a campaign before, come to my house and tell me why they're voting for Howard Dean. These folks are paying their own way to Iowa and knocking on doors in the rain and the cold because they want to do something to change the country.
And then, there's stuff like this:
Today we knocked on over 200 doors in the winding cul-de-sacs of West Des Moines and helped to sway about eight or ten people, which, while it sounds small, could decide a precinct. Some of our greatest moments today included a visit for nourishment at a Chinese restaurant. A man and his wife came in and immediately asked about Dean. He had never caucused before, but we give him some information and he was on his way to finding his caucus location. A woman in West Des Moines remarked that no one had ever really asked her before, but that she was committed for Dean. So Monday she will be off to the caucuses, hopefully with her husband and the other people that she said she would ‘drag’ there. When I asked her to be a dragger, she said, “Yes!”, which is now my very favorite word. Yes!
and this:
On one of the buses up from Texas, Glenn did a survey: “50 people. 23 had never worked on any campaign before. 13 out of 50 had no health insurance. 11 out of 50 were not employed. It was like a portrait of our country.”He also told me about people the Texas buses picked up along the way:
- Lisa Coons and her 11 year old daughter met one bus under the McDonalds arches on I-35, 15 miles from Kansas in Blackbell, Oklahoma
- A woman from New Orleans saw the buses on the Texas website and took a greyhound to Houston (about 6 ½ hours) to catch the 16 hour bus to Des Moines
- Lisa Brodyaga had an immigration hearing at 12:30 in Harlingen, Texas and drove 5 ½ hours to get on the 16 hour bus ride
- “Headrush” drove his motorcycle 4 ½ hours from Amarillo to catch the bus in Oklahoma City
But perhaps the best story is the Oakland train trip – after 20 Dean supporters got on the train in Oakland, they made their car of the train the Dean Car, and so swayed their conductor that he wrote a song about Dean. They brought Flat Howard and made sure he got off at every stop.
In Salt Lake City at 2 AM, a young man got on the train on his way to college in Ohio – within a day, he said he wanted to come out to Iowa, but he didn’t have the money for the extra ticket. “But we knew the Dean way,” Renee said, “so within about 3 minutes everyone had chipped in and we’d bought him a ticket to Iowa and now he’s here knocking on doors.”
And this too:
January 16th, 2004 - 9:38 PM We just stopped at a gas station in West Liberty, Iowa after fixing the windshield wiper. It was flying off so we fixed it. I'm in a van with Rod, one of the people from Meetup, and some other folks - Kelly, Barb, and Scott. We've been having some heated discussion (more of a rant than anything) about the Bush administration and how excited we are for a Dean presidency. We also talked about college quite a bit. There's a lot of junk food roaming around the car. This is good, since I don't have any money to buy food. I bought some bars at the Huddle before I left, so hopefully those will take the place of some meals.
And one thing that strikes me about all this--if it weren't for weblogs and the Internet, we more than likely wouldn't be hearing any of it at all.