Dan's Papers - March 7, 2008

By the time you read this, the Tuesday primaries in Texas and Ohio will have come and gone and the result will be that either Barack Obama is sailing toward the Democratic nomination, or his battle with Hillary Clinton is soldiering on.

This is written late Thursday evening, however, four days before the outcome is known, and I have just been in the middle of a wild and enthusiastic meeting of Obama supporters, who have spent the last four hours at a friend's Southampton home, eating pizza, drinking Coke and making phone calls here in the Hamptons to random people in Texas and Ohio to get out the vote.

I try to stay fairly neutral in these pages when it comes to politics. And I'm not apologizing for being in the middle of a den of Obama people, but my being here did come about by chance. My friend has a very large house on the ocean. We've been sitting around in the library. In another part of the house, this crowd of people, mostly young people, has been in a dining room and a living room down the hall occasionally whooping and hollering in accompaniment to what they were doing.

"What the heck is going on down there?" I asked my friend.

"Let me show you," my friend responded.

We wandered down the hall to find about a dozen of them, sitting at the dining room and kitchen tables all in rows looking down at their laptop computers and occasionally making calls on their cell phones. Apparently they were calling prospective voters.

"I want to try this," I said.

They sat me down at a laptop, which was open to a website called barackobama.com. On the top was a picture of him, smiling in front of an American flag. On the rest of the page were things you can do to help Barack Obama, one of which consisted of a button that read MAKE PHONE CALLS. When you clicked that, you got to another page that said BEGIN HERE.

A caller stood behind me and guided me through the process. There was a map of America, with all the states in gray but four states, which were at issue on Tuesday - Vermont, Rhode Island, Ohio and Texas - were in dark blue. I clicked Ohio. And after a few seconds, in a box, appeared the name HAROLD and a nine-digit phone number.

"What just happened?" I asked.

"The site is hooked up to the national database of every registered voter in the country," my guide said. "You have just been given a voter to call in Ohio."

I sat there and stared at it. Directly below was a written script. It read, "Hello, is _______ there? My name is ______ and I'm calling you on behalf of Barack Obama who as you know, is running for President in the Democratic primary on Tuesday. We think that Barack Obama is the best candidate to bring much needed change to our country. Do you expect you might be voting for him?"

Suddenly, what was on my screen disappeared. I turned.

"What just happened?"

"Let me see. Here it is. The system has shut down the calling to Ohio. It's after 9 p.m. You can't call anybody after 9 p.m."

"That's good," I said.

There was a message on the screen now that explained that.

"Just hit the back arrow," my guide said. "Back up. We'll try Texas. It's not yet 9 p.m. in Texas."

The script for Texas was slightly different, modeled after the fact that you can vote before Tuesday in that state if you want to. I had DWAYNE on my screen.

Below the script were a series of six boxes.

They ranged from DEFINITELY VOTING FOR OBAMA to VOTING FOR ANOTHER PARTY CANDIDATE.

"After Dwayne says what he has to say," my guide told me, "you click on one of these boxes. Then you get a new script to read. And based on his answers, you click more boxes. It's easy."

"How do we know somebody has not already called this person?"

"The responses recorded are sent back into the database. Those that are done don't get put up to be called again."

There were other things on the screen. In another box were the names of the top ten callers, with the number of calls they had completed in descending order next to their names.

There was another box that had a collection of non-responses you could click. NO ANSWER/NOT IN. NOT PARTICIPATING. And so forth and so on.

There was another place where you could click to confine your calls to just men or just women or all.

"This is amazing," I said.

"I guess it couldn't hurt."

My first call, to Dwayne, was a disaster. The main thing was that we weren't back on the page where the first script was. We were on the second script.

"Uh, is this Dwayne?"

"Yeah." He had a strong Texas twang.

"Uh, I'm a caller for a campaign for Barack Obama. We're doing a survey. Are you voting for Barack Obama there in Texas?"

"That's my business," Dwayne said.

"Okay." We hung up. I turned to my guide. "Where's the script? Where's the script?" I shouted.

"Try another," she said, bringing me back to the script.

"I want to just talk to a woman," I said.

The next person, Sheila, defaulted to an answering machine. I told the guide.

"Click NO ANSWER/NOT HOME."

The next four I called also defaulted to answering machines.

"It's not working," I said.

"Most of them are not answering at this time because it's the dinner hour."

"Does Hillary have something like this?"

"I think so. They all do."

On the next call, I hit the jackpot. I got Lottie. Or actually, it wasn't Lottie, but her sister. I glanced at my guide, decided this was too complicated, and just pressed on.

"Hi. Listen, my name is Dan and I'm calling you on behalf of Barack Obama who is running for President in the Democratic Primary in Texas this Tuesday. Are you voting for..."

"I already DID vote for him. He was HERE!"

"Yes. I just came back from Town Hall. He was here and he spoke. This was just an hour ago. He's wonderful. The place was packed. Right after I went out and voted for him."

"So you're a DEFINITE?"

"Well, we're here in New York."

"You're all the way in New York? I'm in Belmont."

"Southern Texas. Thirty miles south of Houston."

I looked at my guide and she asked me to give her the phone, which I did.

Inside of a minute, the two of them were bonding over the phone about Barack Obama. Would she volunteer to help him? She would? What could she do? My guide asked if she could put her on speakerphone so everybody in the dining room could hear, and she said sure. Pretty soon they were talking about getting more people to go out and vote for Obama, or make phone calls for him or put meetings together for him. The energy in this dining room, and indeed, in whatever room Lottie in Texas was in, was tremendous. People were shouting encouragement here. People were shouting encouragement there. You would have thought Barack Obama was a rock star and these were members of his fan club. Well these ARE people in his fan club.

Twenty minutes later - it was now pushing 9:30 p.m. - most of the callers had said their goodbyes and a few of us were left sitting around, including some from elsewhere in the house who were not Obama enthusiasts. We talked.

The Obama people were quite clear that they thought Obama was going to win the nomination and then go on to win the presidency.

"He is just so full of ideas," somebody said. "He throws them up on the wall. Some of them are bound to stick. And he's not a fanatic about it. If things don't stick, he's got other things."

"He's going to need an army of people to try and get all his things done."

Well, I thought. He's got an army. And if he wins, he's got the bureaucracy, a whole army of them too.

"It's a bit chancy, voting for him."

"Yes it is. But I'm willing to take that chance. It's time to take that chance."

Some of the older people in the room said that the energy surrounding Obama reminded them of the energy that surrounded JFK 40 years ago.

Others in the room talked about how it might be safer to vote for someone who was more cautious about things, someone like Hillary Clinton. Or John McCain. They were more circumspect. Possibly because they had more experience.

"They're part of the establishment," somebody said.

"With McCain, it's a whole different philosophy," someone else said. "And it's right out there. People can see it. And they can make the choice. This is going to be a wonderful election, I think. And I hope we win."

I certainly could agree with that. This election campaign sure is a breath of fresh air. No doubt about it. And you know, I'm not so sure that either McCain or Hillary do have this software.