A Colorful Canvas

“I’d like to vote for Nader, but I don’t really think he can win.  So I’ll probably just vote for Bush.”

That was one of the odder answers I received to a question I asked over ten thousand times this summer: “who do you plan to vote for in the presidential election?”  Other answers included “I don’t know, let me ask my wife,” “I don’t follow politics, but would you like to hear some of my short fiction?” and my favorite, “I’m an anarchist.  I don’t believe in voting.  Sort of like Gandhi.” (From a 20-something in an Abercrombie shirt).

I asked the question to pre-teens, illegal immigrants, wheelchair-bound retired people and everyone in between in my twin searches for donations to the Democrats and people not registered to vote.  I worked for a series of organizations dedicated to putting Democrats in power, starting with two soft-money organizations (the much-reviled 527s), of the kind George Soros’ billions and Bruce Springsteen’s concerts pay for, and ending with the Minnesota wing of the Kerry campaign.

The most interesting part of all these jobs was the time I spent talking with potential donors, voters and volunteers. Churchill said that the best argument against democracy is five minutes with the average citizen.  Those five minutes can sometimes also be the best argument for insane asylums.  When I asked a middle aged man which issue was most important to him this year, he responded “oh… issues about life.”  I asked him if he was referring to, say, abortion and he said “no, just life… and how it relates to everything else.  Ya know?”  And then there was the woman who insisted that she wasn’t racist, but that “something needs to be done about all these Hmong immigrants.  I’m afraid one of these days they’ll just break in and kill me,” then as if to illustrate gestured to a group of Hmong children—who didn’t look older than 10—playing next door.

Some of the strangest people I talked to were senior citizens, and through those interactions I learned that aging and retired people are incredibly friendly to total strangers.  They’d gladly invite me into their homes, reminisce about arguments they used to have with their union friends over whether to vote for Nixon, and maybe offer me a Dolly Madison or two before talking for as long as they could keep me captive.  And they vote.  Lord do they vote.  Every last one of them.  In fact, a good half of them serve as election judges, which makes them the lynchpin of the entire electoral process, a thought that’s both reassuring and mildly alarming.  I met a woman who has voted for the Democrat in every presidential election since Adlai Stevenson, which is very impressive and a little sad, because what party really deserves that kind of loyalty?  And really, who wants to lose that often?  Then I saw myself in the mirror and wondered if I have fifty years of voting for losing Democrats to look forward to.  And I realized why so many old Democrats go crazy.

So this summer I learned that I like to talk to crazy people about politics.  Eccentricity isn’t just interesting, it also turns the engines of democracy.  My favorite conversation was with a man who gave me a lovely, stirring, and totally unsolicited one-on-one doorstep oration about his father’s long and honorable career in public service for the state of Wisconsin.  He spoke eloquently and at length about his dad’s fights for union rights and transportation funding.  And then when he had finally finished I paused awkwardly, shifted the clipboard in my hands and asked “So… are you registered to vote?”