About three weeks ago, probably while sitting on my ass wringing my hands over the election horserace and reading posts on the Kos, I came up with what I thought was a completely crazy idea. I decided that the next day, I would walk into my job, go into the office of my HR director, and tell him that I wanted to take a month off. So that day, I went in to the office, sat down, told the HR guy my plan, and to my complete surprise, he basically said, "sure, just run it by your boss." So I went down the hall, sat down with my boss, told him my plan, and he basically said "sure, just run it by the HR guy." And a week later, I was on a one-month unpaid leave of absence from my job, and 4 weeks and a day to do anything I could to help elect Barack Obama and turn North Carolina blue.
My initial plan, as I hatched in that last week of work (in which I got exactly no actual work done), was simple:
1 month, 1000 doors, $5000
Simple, right? In one month, I'll hit a thousand doors, and raise 5 bucks for each door I hit, for a total of $5000. Well, here we are, two weeks away, and I am probably going to have to amend those goals. First, the good news. So far, I've hit around 750 doors. And that is on top of being somewhat deputized by my field director to fully organize a couple of Early Voting Rallies at Duke University, thus taking away some precious door knocking hours... but I digress. So yesterday I decided to increase my goal. Before the close of the polls here in NC on November 4th, I'm pledging to hit at least 2000 doors (hopefully more!)
Now the bad news. My initial idea was to blast all of my family and friends with an email request to 'sponsor' a door knock for $5 a door, with the money going into my personal Obama fundraising page. This proved to be somewhat effective, netting me around $700 total. But I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that my limited social network is somewhat tapped.
So here's where the proven compassion of the community here comes into play. I've upped my pledge to hit doors, but I need your help to hit my goal of raising $5000. So if you can, drop by my blog at 1000doors.wordpress.com, where I'm posting tons of stories about NC and photographs along the way, and drop a couple "knock sponsorships" in my bucket. If you can afford one knock for $5, thats great, if you can afford 10 knocks, that's even better! Feel free to add $.01 so I know its from the Kos community! Also, please add 1000doors to your daily blogroll as I'll keep updating with more stories and photos from the trail if you like what you see. My most recent post handicaps North Carolina's, and specifically Durham's role in the electoral college.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve spoken to hundreds of voters. Most of them have been extremely nice to me, many of them inviting me into their homes or spending some time having some really intelligent and probing conversations about the state of our country. A few have been respectful supporters of our opponent, and an even smaller few have been disrespectful, but its a drop in the bucket in the scheme of things. Going around Durham and speaking to its residents has been a really fun and enlightening experience. I’ve been to neighborhoods I would have never thought I’d be walking through. I’ve talked to young African Americans, old white folks, Hispanic and Japanese and Chinese citizens and residents (and brushed up a bit on my Spanish in the process), and even a couple of kids who are wishing they were just a couple years older so they too could cast their votes. I taught two girls, aged somewhere in the 11-12 range, how to knock doors after they had been following me around on their bicycles, only to find that literally seconds after they were fighting over who would say what, they both froze up and were too nervous to speak when the door finally opened for them. I even met a young man who, regrettably, will turn 18 on November 5 and lamented his day-late birthday. But all of the supporters I’ve talked to had one thing in common, even if they came from radically different backgrounds - they realized the need for us all to recognize as a nation that we have gotten lost in the wilderness, and need to return.
What I’m really trying to say is that this job is easy.
And what I’m really trying to say is that you should try it.
We’ve got just two weeks left to go, and we need that volunteer army. We need every vote we can muster. We are not going to let this be a contested election. We want a runaway. We want the networks to call the election before our California pals have finished dinner. We want a 350+ electoral vote win. We want a convincing popular vote total. We want to show the world that we have made some mistakes over the last eight years, but we are turning the corner. We want a 60 seat Senate and an overwhelming House majority. And the only way to get it is to work.
So join me on the streets or in the phonebanks. Contact your local Obama office and tell them you want to help. If you can't canvass or make phone calls, drop a donation in my bucket to help fund and feed that volunteer army, or bring a Bojangles Tailgate Special over to your local Obama field office for some overworked organizers (they run on fried chicken and biscuits, at least here in Durham). But whatever you do, don’t sit back and let this go by without playing your part.