My 87 year old grandmother has always been a conservative person with conservative values. We usually don’t discuss politics. So I was taken somewhat off guard when she asked me in a recent phone conversation, “You are voting for the RIGHT one, aren’t you?”

She’s voting for Obama.

My parents have been involved in the Republican party in my home town for as long as I can remember. They’ve hosted coffees, helped pass out literature, and my mom was a precinct chairperson for many years. A couple of years ago, my father said to me that he was ashamed to be a Republican and that he couldn’t support that party any longer. They are small business owners and have been for many years. They’re both very excited about the changes that could be coming to our country.

They’re voting for Obama.

I’ve always voted Republican. I’ve always considered myself to have somewhat conservative values. I really don’t get too involved in politics, but this time around I have felt compelled to express my thoughts and concerns about the direction our country has been taking. I’ve been intrigued by coverage of the convention, debates and campaign. I’m concerned about our involvement in a seemingly endless wars. There are a lot of other reasons, too…but the most important reasons are the two that I just tucked into bed.

I’m voting for Obama.

Not just for me, but for my family. Because I want them to wake up to a different country – the country that we CAN be.

Won’t you vote for change, too?

I’ve been swinging between gleeful excitement and quaking dread for weeks now. Tonight will be like Christmas Eve but who will come down our chimneys? Santa Barry with a big bag filled with happiness or GIANT HOPE-SUCKING BATS?

I have to calm down! Luckily, volunteering has been as calming as yoga or breathing into a paper bag. On Saturday, I participated in a phone bank with my wonderful young friend BH. She turned 18 less than a month ago and is over-the-moon excited about voting in her first election. She brought along a classmate who isn’t old enough to vote yet but very eager to participate as a volunteer. Their energy and cheerful optimism did wonders for my outlook and reminded me that despite much experience to the contrary, I’m an optimist as well.

And optimism is what this campaign has been all about. Hope vs fear. Dr. King’s dream come true vs an endless nightmare. Thoughful and stoic vs impulsive hothead.

I hope people vote with their hearts and heads as well as their wallets. I hope Barry’s Tutu is standing at his side when he’s inaugurated in January. I hope John McCain retires from politics and becomes an awesome and respected stand-up comic. I hope we can win back the trust of the rest of the world. 

I hope.

Kevin helped produce our old video collective Leche Magica. He’s working on this blog now, which has some great stuff!

http://votebama.com/

I have been so caught up in the work and the moment, and a bit of fear of the worst, that I haven’t thought much about how amazing Tuesday could be. Will be. Today I let myself imagine it for a minute. Truly imagine it. I even closed my eyes to help forgot that I was alone in a subway at 3am, going home to sleep for a few hours before heading back to Obama HQ to Get Out The Vote.

I visualized the moment we knew without a doubt, that Obama was the next President of the United States. It wouldn’t be at the concession, you can’t be happy then. It was the moment Obama steps out on stage in Grant Park and waved to the people of my town. The people I joined to elect Harold Washington, the first African-American mayor, the people I danced with in the South Side streets to celebrate the Bulls, those great Chicago people who were now going to send their Senator to the White House.

In my imagination, I felt happier than I ever have before. So happy that it made me wonder if I have ever even experienced happiness. Then I veered off into imagining making out with strangers and dancing on tabletops under a rain of confetti, because that’s how all my “The War’s Over” fantasies end up. Sorry, I don’t have much experience with such things. My wars have always started and ended slowly, happiness arrives almost imperceptibly.

A few days ago, I was joking that I couldn’t wait for the election to be over so I could go back to caring about stupid things, but I realize now that this isn’t quite it. A nice middle-aged black woman who was doing data entry in our office helped me realize that, when she hollered at me for my glib comment. No, of course, I won’t want to go back to caring about stupid things. I plan to hold on to this hope, enthusiasm, commitment on November 5th and into the next decade. There is so much to do and I know, like so many people do now, that politics isn’t something outside of us, out of our control, or even something that you elect the best people to do and then you can happily go about your business. Politics is all of us, every day, staying engaged in what’s happening in our neighborhoods, in the world. Talking about it with our neighbors and friends, and most importantly, doing something. Volunteering creates community, community creates positive progress towards shared goals. We are the government, we are politics. We are what’s next.  I don’t want to lose this. I want to work with all of these people again. I don’t want us to all go back to our own separate worlds.

I’ve worked in offices and fields with lots of different kinds of people from different races, religions, nationalities, which is often a source of self-made divisions. At my job at O’Hare, the white guys called me a sellout when I sat with the black guys (they even had a hand sign for it), the black guys disowned me when they caught me playing hackey sack. Very few of the black women liked me at all, except Doris who still says to say hey, and the white women, well, of course I didn’t want to hang with any group that would have me as a member. In my work in the jazz and comedy worlds, race and gender play a constant factor in many complex ways on and off stage.

But in the Obama office, and in this campaign, I don’t see this. I see people celebrating their differences not as a way to define or divide but as a way to share experience with others who share a common goal.  Our differences are openly discussed, mocked, and celebrated. When we share our experience, it belongs to everyone, so we all feel like we belong, and this campaign really feels like it belongs to all of us. This victory will feel like it belongs to all of us. And this country will feel like it belongs to all of us again. Then we can get to the business of making it great.

Last Friday was Halloween and also the 13th anniversary of my father’s death. My father wasn’t a great father, but he did instill in me some ideas about the world, a healthy blend of ideas inherited from his American Communist mother and self-made Capitalist father. He had plenty of opinions but was never politically active, unless you count wearing a pink triangle on his stock trader’s jacket, an often-misunderstood message of civil rights solidarity. He didn’t even vote, “not since they killed Bobby.”

I had to be reminded to think about him on Friday because I was so busy volunteering for the campaign. When I did think about him, I thought to myself, Pops would not be sitting this one out. I think he would also have felt his hope restored, hope for this country, for others, and for himself. And that won’t be over on November 5th, that’s just the beginning.

Ok back to work and sleep perchance to dream, of strangers and tabletops and confetti.

Help us win this.

My friend Wayne Escoffery plays sax on this great song by Cynthia Scott.

I’m voting for Obama primarily because I believe that the wealthy aren’t paying their fair share of taxes. I’m sitting firmly in the middle class and when they released Cindy McCain’s 2007 taxes last week I compared rates and found that I’m paying a higher percentage than she is. Warren Buffet is paying a significantly lower tax rate.

Having said that I think that the middle class shouldn’t just be given a tax break. We should have to earn it. We should be required to reduce our consumption of petroleum in order to pay lower taxes. This will produce a demand for new technology that will create high-paying jobs. I’m not going to attempt to dictate how best to implement this idea, but I’m hoping this post will start a discussion. (full disclosure: I’m an Engineer and an increase in the demand for energy efficient or alternative energy tech would likely drive job growth in my field)

From everything that I’ve seen, heard, and read, it is obvious to me that Obama “gets it.” He has a deep understand of, and commitment to, what is really important. He will bring this country together by focusing on what we can agree upon, and he will move us forward by reminding us that what unites us is so much more important that what could divide us. That is what a true leader does: bring people together behind a common cause to achieve a common goal. It’s easy for all of us to forget that, with the example of divisiveness we’ve had over the past eight years. Obama will lead this great country to the next level of greatness!!

I assume that most of you do not need to hear my reasons for supporting Barack Obama to have many very good ones of your own.  But as an old campaigner, let me post on a different topic:  why it will take a landslide.

If we could trust that this election would be unlike those we have endured since 2000, that voter access would be fair and reasonable, and that votes would be accurately and honestly counted, then Obama supporters could take at least as much confidence as hope into the stretch drive.  The numbers are that good.  But although a real landslide is in the making, the unfortunate (and inconvenient) truth is that for Obama to win at all, a landslide is what it will take.

Republican voter suppression tactics have disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of legitimately qualified voters in past elections, and more of the same is happening right now.  Under the oxymoronic Help America Vote Act, many of these disenrollment practices have metastasized.  For just one recent example, 30,000 newly registered folks in swing state Colorado have been purged based on a mail confirmation tactic that almost certainly violates the Voting Rights Act.

There are many ways voter participation is suppressed, but one of the most effective is the simple technique of ensuring that the waiting lines at the polls are so long that many get discouraged and give up.  With turnout in the most democratic precincts expected to be at record levels, the delays caused by too few polling places, unreliable machines, ill-trained poll workers, and swarms of Republican operatives challenging as many voters as they can will be daunting.

Not only do we have to overcome this kind of suppression, we also have to overwhelm the fraudulent  counts generated by paperless voting machines across the country.  The evidence (for example, the pro Bush disparity between exit polls and the machine count in every key swing state in 2004) that the last presidential election was stolen is overwhelming.  Clearly, the opportunity and motive to perpetrate the same crime is no less today.  Already, early voting accounts from places like West Virginia testify to touch screens flipping intended votes away from Obama and into McCain or third party candidates.

So, without even factoring in the Bradley effect of racism hidden within polling data (which a consensus of pollsters might put at about 6%), we have our work still very much cut out for us if we are to elect the Obama/Biden ticket.

But there are other good reasons to keep on working to do all that we can.  We are movement building, and regardless of outcome, that will stand us in good stead.  In a worst case scenario, we suffer another fraudulent election outcome and “lose.”  In that case, an overwhelmingly strong progressive movement will be an utter necessity to give us any chance to set things right.  The bigger the pre-election polls and election day exit polling margins for Obama, the more obvious the theft.  And the bigger the outcry for investigations, recounts and, if need be, a new election, the better our chances to rectify the result.

In a best case scenario, we win.  But in order to effect real change, more than holding the White House is needed.  We need to win the post election interpretation of the result, that it was a decisive rejection of the Republican ideology of war, plutocracy and tyranny, and a mandate for peaceful relations, progressive tax and budget priorities and the rule of law.  We need to press the Congress and the White House to adopt the policies that benefit our families and our future.  And we will need to carry this work forward while confronted with the same impediments to progress that have been ascendant for a generation.

All of this will be difficult.  It just might take a landslide.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

I am for Obama because he represents the America that America used to aspire to be, that we all aspire to live in.  The country that lead by example, not by bullying.  The country that prosecuted people for water boarding, not gave them medals.  The country that uses military force as a last option, not one that lies to its own people and the world to justify actions that should never have been taken.  The country where, once you’ve risked your life for it, you’re treated with the care and dignity that shows how much we appreciate what you did in our name.  The country where our leader is somebody who we admire for his intelligence, not for his ability to clear brush and be “one of the guys”.

I’m also for Obama because it shows that we’ve come closer to our aspirations of a country of racial equality.