A Cog’s-Eye View of “The Best Ground Game in History”

Picture the scene: a bustling store-front office on Philadelphia’s South Street, walls covered with brightly colored campaign posters and murals depicting the President of the United States, a cacophony of volunteers huddled around cluttered tables, punching telephone numbers into cell phones.  My laptop displays results of a search on the campaign’s database for supporters likely to volunteer.  After punching a number into my own phone I glance to my right and see a video cameraman kneeling beside me to frame a shot of me and a man at another table.  I quickly look away.  Standing behind him is a courtly, Middle-Eastern-looking man interviewing another volunteer.  It turns out that they are from Al Jazeera and have stopped by to take a look at our operation, one of many in Philadelphia and identical to thousands throughout the United States in the waning days of October 2012.

How did I come to be here, a long way from the quiet green hillsides and snow-flecked peaks of my Swiss home? 

I have always been interested in politics, but it took the disastrous results of the 2000 Presidential election to motivate me to volunteer for a campaign.  In 2004 The Spouse and I both canvassed on behalf of John Kerry (who won Pennsylvania despite losing the national election) and I worked to get out the vote (GOTV in campaignese) in local elections in 2005 and 2006.  In 2008 I was inspired by a young African-American named Barack Obama and worked to support him in the Pennsylvania primary (where he lost to Hillary Clinton) and the general election.  But I confined myself to low-risk activities like entering voter information into the campaign’s computer database and making phone calls.

Now I find myself working every evening until 9 o’clock and facing the prospect of managing canvassing in my neighborhood on Election Day.  I take orders from Scott, a Field Organizer (FO) for the Obama campaign, who is only a few years older than my own son.  He is wiry and intense and wields a sharp ironic sense of humor.  He has been at work in Philadelphia for six months to build up a volunteer staff for GOTV;  I learn after the election that he has lost 20 pounds during this time, largely because he is always so busy he forgets to eat.

I had followed the developing campaign via the internet and sometime in the spring, appalled by the way things were going, I resolve that I will take time away from my Swiss idyll to work for Obama in Philadelphia.  Sharing my concern, The Spouse agrees that I should go, even though it will mean our longest separation in more than 30 years of marriage.  I leave for the US late in September, heading first to visit family in Wyoming.  On the 8^th of October I walk into the South Street office for the first time.

Logan Circle (for some reason, on its side)

Scott and I have previously exchanged emails about my intention to volunteer.  I ask for him at the front desk and the volunteer directs me to a back room where he is hunched over his laptop,  He introduces me to Jenn, another FO who has taken a year off from medical school to work for the campaign.  Scott is responsible for Center City Southwest, she for Center City Southeast, each of which encompasses a number of precincts in the heart of Philadelphia.  He shows me the area on a map that he has pasted together out of sections from Google Maps.  Scott and the other FOs take their orders from a Regional Field Director in Philadelphia, herself under a State Director. 

He begins by outlining the campaign’s plan.  On a piece of scrap paper he sketches a graph, whose x axis is degree of support for Obama and y is propensity to vote.  Cross-hatching the area of high support and high voting – “the kind of people who vote for dog catcher,” he says – he explains that we will all but ignore them.  Instead, we will focus our efforts on people who are believed likely to support Obama but don’t vote regularly.  It all seems elementary to me; only after the election is over do I realize how revolutionary the plan actually was.

For months Scott and a handful of local volunteers have focused on registering new voters.   They have been hugely successful but in two days voter registration in Pennsylvania closes.  After that everything shifts to the fundamentals of GOTV – identifying supporters and building a force of volunteers. 

Scott re-introduces me to VAN, the Democratic Party online database that includes millions of bits of information about registered voters (in a section entitled My Voters) and supporters (My Campaign).  In previous campaigns I did quite a bit of data entry into VAN; despite all the talk about fancy new campaign apps it seems little changed – and, truth to be told, somewhat outmoded.  In a few days I am familiar with the intricacies of My Campaign through my work to recruit volunteers.  In his position as FO, Scott is given daily quotas for how many calls he and his volunteers make and how many volunteer shifts we manage to schedule.  I quickly learn that the Obama Campaign has high expectations of its workers, paid and unpaid, and that the more you do the more will be asked of you.

I spend most of my days working alongside other volunteers, some of whom are like me more-or-less full-time.  There is Jack, a quiet young man from the New York area who has just graduated from college and has been here a month.  He sleeps in a spare room in a home provided by campaign supporters and eats mostly peanut butter sandwiches because he doesn’t have much money.   I recognize Mike, a brash Australian in his fifties, from 2008; a self-professed “political junkie,” he loves to work on American campaigns.  Howard, a soft-spoken retired union organizer from Washington, D.C., helped run Cincinnati’s GOTV organization four years ago. 

At the end of the normal work day we are joined by other volunteers who come to “phone bank” – the name anachronistically evokes images of long lines of landline telephones, but these days it is only volunteers using their own cell phones or cheap pre-paid cells purchased by the campaign.  Prime hours for phoning are 6 to 9, when people generally are home from work.  Even then, however, we are lucky if one in ten of our calls is answered.  In a busy city like Philadelphia people aren’t often home and moreover most have caller ID and don’t answer if they don’t recognize the number.

We print out dense sheets of names and numbers for volunteers to call.  At the beginning of each phone bank session one of us hands out a detailed script that the campaign has composed (and often focus-group tested), and that changes according to the stages of the election cycle.  We do a brief training – but the more experienced volunteers generally revert to their own routines.  If the targeted person answers, the volunteer is supposed to find out if he or she is an Obama supporter and if so would be interested in volunteering.  They tick off appropriate boxes on the form -- “NH” (Not Home), “DIS” in the frequent case that the phone is no longer active, a number from 1 to 5 reflecting Obama supporter (1), undecided (3), or Romney supporter (5).  Because these are targeted voters there are few of the latter, but occasionally someone who supported Obama in 2008 has switched.  If a person is undecided we might offer our own stories why we support the President, but we don’t spend a lot of time in persuasion.  There are so many Democrats in Philadelphia that it is a better use of our time to identify supporters and make sure they vote.  Before each phone bank is over we are responsible for entering the all results into the database – unlike four years ago, the campaign has decreed that all data must be entered by midnight. 

After settling into a routine in the first few days I attend trainings on Friday afternoon and Sunday evening.  The first, at the state headquarters in a Center City office building, provides a general introduction to the campaign’s general philosophy and organization.  It is led by several of the regional leaders, who begin by telling the stories of how they came to be there – a practice that I later realize has its roots in Obama’s experience as a community organizer.  We are encouraged to develop concise and effective versions of our own stories to use in relating to volunteers who we will be leading.  At the end we practice assembling canvassing packets, a surprisingly complicated combination of address sheets for targets, campaign literature and maps showing the most efficient way of walking the area.

The Sunday training, for all volunteers who will be taking leadership roles in GOTV, is held at a beautiful historic townhouse on Locust Street in Center City that is now a union headquarters.   Speakers bring a sense of urgency to the occasion by pointing out that of the many different ways Obama can get to 270 votes in the Electoral College, ALL of them include Pennsylvania.  In other words, he can’t win unless he wins Pennsylvania.  And as we know, he can’t win Pennsylvania unless he wins massively in Philadelphia, because most of the rest of the state is heavily Republican.  And – unlike many other states – Pennsylvania has no early voting.  We have only 13 hours, from 7 am to 8 pm, to turn out every possible Obama vote.  One campaign leader tells an admonitory tale of how he narrowly lost a Congressional race in South Carolina because his staffers failed to catch the fact that several key Democratic precincts opened an hour late.  To make sure that our GOTV organization is the best that it can be, the campaign has scheduled repeated dry runs during the weekends leading up Election Day.

Entrance to our Staging Location

Instead of using centralized offices as in the past, GOTV will be run out of many small Staging Locations located in the neighborhoods and staffed by local residents.  I have already been focusing my efforts on the Logan Circle neighborhood just north of my apartment; Scott has found us a perfect location, in offices belonging to another union right in the middle of the neighborhood.  At the training meeting I meet Stephanie, who will be Staging Location Director (SLD), and Regine and Sandi who will share duties as Phonebank Director.  Scott tells me that I will be Canvass Director.  I have never done anything remotely like this – I don’t think I’m particularly good at managing people – but there it is.

And so over the following three weeks life falls into a routine of telephone calls to recruit volunteers and on the weekends running canvasses.  There is a bit of a glitch the first dry run Saturday because we can’t use the office, so we set up a table in the little courtyard in front and work from there.  Fortunately, it is a glorious fall day.  I do my training of canvassers – at least the ones that show up on time – and then set up the phoners.  One of them, an older African-American woman, discovers that her phone list includes many residents of the subsidized apartment building where she lives.  The rest of us are delighted by her down-to-earth conversations with her neighbors.  With one woman in her late 90s: “Yes, honey, I know you are ready to go, but you can’t until after the election!”

Canvassers work not only to identify supporters but to cultivate in them mental habits that will encourage them to vote on Election Day.  For many this is no easy task, for it is a regular working day with no time off to vote.  For working people who have busy lives and families and don’t have a habit of voting, it can be easy to forget.  So, along with brochures on issues, canvassers carry colorful cards with a photograph of the President and First Lady on one side.  When they find supporters they ask them to fill out the cards and sign a commitment to vote.  We collect these; a few days before the election we will mail them back as reminders of their commitment.

As the election nears canvassers continue to reach out even to people who have been contacted before.  They make sure voters know where the polling place is and in conversation urge them to begin to make a plan.  Scott tells me, and I tell the canvassers, that research shows that people who visualize themselves through the process are more likely to vote, and our goal is to obtain that small extra percentage increase.  (It is only afterward that I learn that the campaign’s use of social science research like this is also pathbreaking.)

Those of us who manage the canvassing and phoning also have lots to learn.  At the beginning of every shift we are supposed to report to the SLD how many canvassers and how many packets are out, and the next shift we report on how many attempts were made during the previous shift.  Our SLD Stephanie reports these numbers to Scott, who reports them to his Field Director, and so on up the line.

After two weekends of dry runs, as we enter the final weekend before the Election we feel well prepared.  Even moreso because we have been joined by Lizzie, a university student from London who has flown over to volunteer for the last week of the campaign.  She is smart, funny and willing to do whatever is asked of her.  This is especially valuable because most of the Logan Circle leaders except for me have full-time jobs and can’t be there every twelve-hour day.

Monday before Election Day is important because that is when campaigns traditionally distribute door tags with the location of their polling places on them.  This is a particularly complicated and expensive part of GOTV, because tags for each precinct must be specially prepared and kept apart from others.  In our area, it is also difficult because many people live in high-rise apartment buildings that canvassers can’t access.  We have been hard at work trying to find ways around this problem, such as locating supporters who live in the buildings who are willing to distribute tags within their buildings, or at least to let canvassers into the building to do it.  By the end of the day, we are pleased that we have been able to get into a substantial majority of the buildings in our area.

The difference between this campaign and the usual approach is driven home for me when we get a visit from the local Democratic committee person.  She notes, amiably enough, that her neighbors had been complaining because they didn’t get their usual door tags.  I explain that that was because the campaign knew that these people always voted and thus didn’t need tags.  We were focusing our efforts on those who often didn’t get out to vote.  Fortunately, that seems to satisfy her but I am surprised at the lack of communication between the Party and the Obama organization.

As Election Day dawns we feel ready.  The “tick-tock,” a minute-by-minute schedule for “E-Day,” stipulates that the FO calls his/her SLD at 5:30 am; in turn she or he is supposed to call the directors of canvassing and phone-banking.  Offices are supposed to open at 6:00 am.  Because polling places don’t open until 7:00 am, Stephanie and I agree that I will open the office at 6:45, while Stephanie goes to vote.  But Scott frowns on this laxness, and so I arrive shortly after 6:00.   I turn on my computer and lay out canvassing packets for the 9:00 shift.  I read the latest blog posting from Nate Silver, whose statistical savvy has helped keep me sane during the ups and downs of the preceding month.  (That, and the fact that I was generally too busy to pay much attention to the small crises of the campaign.)  Whenever someone asks me how I think it’s going, I say “I’m cautiously hopeful.”  The race in Pennsylvania has tightened in the past week – Romney even made a campaign stop in a Philadelphia suburb – but I’m actually glad because that prevents people from getting complacent.  Nothing is more dangerous to a campaign than complacency.

Training Canvassers

There is plenty of time to vote and check out that all polling places in our area have opened on time.  After voting I finally pick up coffee and breakfast on my way back to the office.  When Lizzie arrives I give her some money and send her out to buy coffee for the volunteers – surprisingly, the campaign has given us no money for refreshments, although supporters have brought in munchies of various kinds over preceding days.  Later in the day a supporter in the neighborhood carries in a stack of cheese pizzas, thereby assuring that staple of all campaigns.

As the morning passes there is a growing hum of activity and excitement in the office.  Over the weekend we had been alarmed at a high rate of no-shows among volunteers, but today more people show up than have signed up to volunteer.  We have so many canvassers that I am able to send a group to another district with too few – the height of success for a field organization.  Each of our areas have been canvassed three times when the polls close at 8:00 pm.  Scott calls repeatedly to ask about lines at the polling places.  If there are long lines we are supposed to dispatch volunteers – or go ourselves – to talk to people in line and make sure they stay there.  If they are in line by 8:00 pm they must be allowed to vote, but they have to be willing to wait.  Strangely, all of our runners say that there are no lines, everything is going smoothly.  Even so, turnout is good.  Could it be that our educational project succeeded in getting many people to show up early?

At the end of a long Election Day

As the polls close the office slowly empties out.  Stephanie, Regine, Lizzie and I are too nervous to think of leaving.  We begin picking up the place, laughing rather giddily at odd events of the day.  Scott calls to heap abundant praise upon us for our work.  By nine o’clock, Pennsylvania has been called for Obama.  Stephanie and Lizzie plan to meet others at the Warwick Hotel, where the Democratic Party traditionally holds its Election Night celebration, but I am far too tired to do anything but go home.

In Switzerland, the Spouse has gone to bed early and gotten up at 2:30 am his time, 8:30 pm Philadelphia time.  At that hour even the international CNN station is running US election night coverage.  I call our internet telephone number, and settle into a chair in our apartment to “watch” the returns through him because I have no cable or internet.  Sometime after 10 pm Ohio – and hence the entire election – is called for Obama, and I decide to go to bed.  I’ve just stretched out when I receive a raucous call from my friends at the Warwick, where everyone is obviously having a very good time.

I am too wired to sleep well, but enjoy the opportunity to lie abed the next morning before heading out to my favorite coffee shop for breakfast and free wifi to catch up with the news.  Then I must return to my condo and pack, for I have a ticket to return to Switzerland that afternoon. 

Regine, Lizzie, Jack, Scott and Stephanie

The following evening I participate in a celebratory conference call with my campaign buddies, who have met for lunch at Regine’s office.  Scott points out that despite generally lower turnout this year as compared to 2008, our area has seen a 7% increase in turnout.  Philadelphia as a whole has given 85% of its votes to Obama.  We congratulate ourselves on having been part of “the best field organization in history.”

Wandering the Rhone, Part II

The next morning we resumed our journey.  The Rhône widens at Lyon and assumes an even more industrial and commercial aspect, laden with long freight barges.  This isn’t surprising – for millennia it has been a highway between the Mediterranean world and the heart of what is now France.  As far as possible we stayed close to the river, but our way was often blocked by industrial plants like oil refineries.  As with the Mississippi in the United States, the banks were reinforced by large levees that it was hard to see over.

When we reached the city of Vienne, there occurred one of those serendipities that make travel worthwhile.  A wrong exit off the motorway put us on a road running along the eastern bank of the river.  Not really knowing where we were, we took the first right, which put us on a bridge over the Rhône.  To our right on the western bank stood a large modernist building surrounded by open fields, which I suddenly realized – I was acting as co-pilot and had been responsible for the wrong turning – that the fields looked unmistakably like archaeological ruins.

We hadn’t realized that Vienne has a sister museum to the one in Lyon, with even more extensive exhibits and Roman ruins.  As soon as we managed to turn around and find a parking place we knew that our plans for the day would have to be revised – we had a good morning’s work ahead of us.

Model of Roman Vienne

The museum at Saint-Romain-en-Gal, located across the river from the town of Vienne, is a state-of-the-art establishment, with excellent explanatory displays that take full advantage of a treasure trove of artifacts uncovered in the area, many through recent excavations on the site.  It seems that this was an even larger Roman city than Lyon, a major port and administrative center.   

Because the lands on the western bank had not been developed in later years it was possible to excavate a large section of the former Roman city, including storehouses, shops and extensive villas owned by wealthy merchants.  Many of the exquisite mosaics that had decorated their rooms were recovered and displayed, as well as some amazing wall paintings.

After exhausting the museum we walked the ruins themselves and attempted to imagine what life in those villas – with their open court-yards, shady arbors and reflecting pools – might have been like.   

And then we returned to the museum building for a pleasant lunch at a restaurant overlooking the river.

Afterward we explored Vienne proper, which had some impressive Roman buildings intermingled with later developments, including a church with a nice Romanesque cloister.  An impressive temple dedicated to Augustus and his wife Livia stood opposite a line of busy shops; farther up the hill there was another amphitheater.  We were beginning to agree with the opinion that France has more and better Roman ruins than Italy itself.

 Having spent the better part of the day in Vienne, we hastened to our next destination.  Leaving the Rhône, we drove southeast to the Côtes du Rhône region where we planned to spend some time getting reacquainted with our favorite wines.   During our last visit to Provence several years ago, we happened to drive by the Hôtel Les Florets, an attractive country hotel in the foothills of the Dentelles de Montmirail above the village of Gigondas.  We had reserved a table on the terrace overlooking vine-covered hillsides and had one of the most memorable dinners of our lives.  So, while planning our Rhône adventure we were determined to return and stay there.

We were not disappointed.  Even though the weather was a bit rainy and cool, the hotel was a perfect place to reconnect with the Provençal countryside that we love, with its dry pine-covered hills that always remind me of southern California.   The hotel’s terrace with its stunning views was the perfect place for a pre-dinner aperitif, even if it was too cool to eat outside.  The food was every bit as good as we’d remembered, and we enjoyed the chance to explore further its extensive wine list.  We picked the brains of the sommelier, who happened to be the innkeeper who had checked us in and who we met again the next day cleaning the swimming pool.  Foremost among our discoveries was how much we enjoyed the Muscat grown in nearby Beaumes-de-Venise, even though we’d never liked sweet wines before.

The next day was Sunday, and because of our experience with Switzerland’s strict Sunday closing laws we were afraid we would miss the chance to visit the local wine cellars.  Hence we were pleased to find that all the shops in Gigondas would open for business after lunch.  After a walk through the hilltop village we had a tasting-menu lunch (a series of small tapas-style bites paired with different wines) and visited a number of caveaus to partake of free samples of their wares.  We came away with quite a nice collection for our cellar.

On Monday we were back on the road, returning to the Rhône after a swing through Beaumes-de-Venise to pick up some of the afore-mentioned Muscat.  We passed by the city of Avignon, site of the Papal palace for much of the 14^th century, but didn’t stop because we’d visited before in long-ago graduate student days.  Once more we diverged from the river to head toward the town of St. Rémy-de-Provence where another major Roman site awaited us. 

Hard on the heels of our tours of Lyon and Vienne, our visit to the ruins of the city of Glanum firmly cemented our understanding of the sweep and power of the Roman world in this part of France.  Glanum was founded in the 6^th century BC by a Celto-Ligurian tribe on the site of a healing spring in the foothills of the Alpilles; beside the spring was a shrine to the Celtic god Glanis.  Trade with the Greek colony of Marseilles about 90 kilometers to the south brought Hellenistic influences that can be seen in remains of houses, shops and shrines.  In the 1^st century BC the Romans attacked and leveled these and gradually reconstructed the city in their image.   

They erected a massive triumphal arch at the entrance to the city near the end of the reign of Augustus – it clearly promotes acculturation to the Roman way by contrasting Celts in chains with free men in Roman garb.  Nearby is a monumental mausoleum to the Julii family.  Within the city itself the Romans constructed ever-larger buildings – a forum, baths, temples – atop the ruins of the previous buildings. 

In turn, however, the city was overrun by the Alamanni in 260 AD and subsequently abandoned.  Over the centuries its buildings were dismantled to provide stones for a new village on the plain that became St. Rémy.  Only the monuments on the edge of the city survived; known as “Les Antiques” they became a must-see for travelers on the Grand Tour.  In the 1920s, sustained archaeological excavations began to decipher the layers of previous civilizations.

Today the ruins stand in a large sun-baked park flanked on one side by an olive grove and on the other by the rocky outcroppings of the Alpilles.  It was hot but fascinating work to move back and forth between the Celtic, Hellenic and Roman layers.  Surrounded by the dry crags of the hills the area seemed to exist in a dimension beyond time.

Yet once we had finished there was little time left to visit the other attraction standing on the other side of the olive grove – the Monastery of St. Paul-de-Mausole, with its attached mental hospital where Vincent van Gogh resided for a year near the end of his life.  The site draws many visitors eager to view the room where he ostensibly lived, but it is a reconstruction.  We were actually more interested in visiting the Monastery’s Romanesque church and cloister.  But as we left the sight of olive trees in late-afternoon light reminded us of the source of some of van Gogh’s work during his stay.

Our hotel afforded a wonderful view of the Alpilles and we enjoyed exploring the old town with its maze of narrow streets encircled by a broad café-lined boulevard.  During our two nights there we had pleasant dinners but enjoyed most the time spent sitting at a café under the stars.

But we still had yet to complete our mission to follow the Rhône to its end.  On our last day before returning home we drove through the Alpilles, past the impressive cliff-top castle ruins of Les Baux, to rejoin the Rhône at Arles.  As it nears the Mediterranean, the river divides into two branches (the large and small), the land in between a large marshy delta called the Camargue.  Parts of the wetlands have been turned into rice fields, and there are vast evaporation beds from which sea salt is extracted.  But much of the area is a protected Nature Park where wildlife flourishes, from flamingos and wild boars to white horses.

We stayed with the Grand Rhône on the eastern edge of the Camargue, intent on finding the point where it entered the sea.   

But we began to realize that this wasn’t going to be so easily done, because our road diverged to the west and ended at a broad beach a couple of miles from the river.  Having been assured by a guide at a local nature area that we could walk to the river from there, we parked the car and set out eastward on foot.

The Mediterranean was as blue as I remembered but a strong wind was blowing from the west and few others had ventured out.  We passed a ghost city of campers that seemed permanently installed on the beach, waiting for the weekend or summer vacation for their owners to return.

After we had walked along the beach for about a mile, we encountered another challenge to our mission, in the form of a large warning sign:

Nudist Beach: Here one lives nude

It seems that the rest of the area was reserved for nudists.  Alarmed, we debated the wisdom of continuing.  But, seeing that there were few people around we decided to venture forth, keeping our eyes averted when necessary.   

It turned out that there were only a few nudists intrepid enough to swim on such a blustery day.  Eventually we finally reached the end of the camping city.  Climbing some large sand dunes we were able to survey the last marshy expanse of the river before it disappeared into the sea.

Feeling satisfied that we had done what we set out to do, we returned to St. Rémy for the night and drove back to Switzerland the next day.  Because I was feeling homesick for the mountains we headed northwest into the French Alps.  We lunched in the charming city of Gap and passed through Grenoble on our way home.

I’m not sure I can say that we learned a particular lesson in tracing the Rhône from its origin in an Alpine glacier to its end.  But in the process we gained further appreciation for the many-layered history of the region – and a nice little collection of Côtes du Rhône wine.