One NH Voter's Primary Eve

After W. Mitt Romney failed to show up in Durham, I spent Election Eve campaigning and rallying for John Edwards.  The day closed with a great rally at the Dover Elks Lodge.  --Timothy Horrigan: January 7, 2008

I spent most of the day campaigning and/or rallying for John Edwards. However, I began at 8am hoping to harrass Willard Mitt Romney at Young's Restaurant in the college town of Durham (where I live.) Willard M. has scheduled several visits to Young's during the last year or so. He never showed up at any of them. He didn't show up this time either. I would be tempted to think that the Young's thing is a running joke of some sort, were it not for the fact that W. Mitt has no sense of humor. (Young's, by the way, is where I first met John Edwards, back in the summer of 2003. For months afterwards, whenever Edwards was mentioned on New England Cable News, the network would run a closeup shot of him at this typical coffee shop, taken by a camera just inches above my head, and hence from a point of view virtually identical to my subjective point of view.)

After messing around with my web site and clearing away unsold Second Life Christmas trees from my avi's land, I went over to Dover to the Edwards office where I got a "turf" of about 40 houses, just a few blocks from my house. It was a mild, cloudy day, which would have been good for canvassing were it not for the ice all over the place, especially on the steps to people's front doors. Luckily, I was in a neighborhood where people still use the doors to their houses (rather than entering through their garages.) However, there weren't many people to talk to. The first person was a friendly gentleman in his 70s who was chipping ice on his driveway: however, he was a Republican and the brother of the man on my list. The second person was an obnoxious person who was pissed off by all the phone calls and people knocking on my door. As she shut the door on me, I started to make some remark about the value of her vote and Kenya and Pakistan (where people die for their votes.) It got a little better with the third person on my list, an old friend and ally who is going with Obama, but who was pleased to see me canvassing.  I finished the first turf  at lunchtime, drove back to Dover and got a second one:  my own block and a couple of neighboring ones (plus a third street 2 miles away included by mistake because someone mixed up "Magrath Way" with the next street in alphabetical order, which was "Marden Way.")  I started by coding myself "JRE," i.e. a committed Edwards supporter.

Durham is a college town, and the neighborhoods I canvassed today were primarily handsome but generally unostentatious houses built between the 1920s and 1960s for faculty. In recent years, the faculty have been priced out of the town: many of the 30- and 40-somethings who bought the original owners are financial and high-tech executives. The executives, interestingly, are just as radical as the professors. My next door neighbor, for example, who is in the mutual funds business, is a Kucinich supporter. Durham is mostly Obama Country, especially amongst the professors: they like Edwards, but Obama is their guy. This is not shocking: aside from the fact that he is himself a professor, he has been endorsed by our Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter (who lives in Rochester, but who grew up in Durham.)

In the evening, after eating lasagna and making a few pages of phone calls at the Dover Edwards office, I headed to the final rally of the campaign, at the Dover Elks Lodge. Some of my neighbors showed up, perhaps because I canvassed their houses. I ended up as part of the backdrop of the event, up on the same proscenium stage where I once saw the late Tommy Makem singing. Edwards jumped up on a thrust stage built in front of the proscenium, and even though he was dressed in a crisp blue suit, he reminded me of a welterweight boxer. For better or worse, he is the scrappiest candidate in the race, and a fighter is what we will need during the General Election and during the years which follow George W. Bush's long-awaited departure on Januaru 20, 2009 (378 days after the Primary.)

Speaking of Tommy Makem, the great Irish singer who lived in Dover, John Edwards attracted the biggest crowd in the town since Makem's funeral: over a thousand voters showed up at the Elks Lodge.  (I don't know how Makem would have voted, although one of the musicians he frequently played with was on one of my earlier canvas lists, and he turned out to be leaning towards Hillary— but that was back in November.)