But really, it’s my son Nicholas Brown

 

Two point five million. Now let’s put it upside down with exclamation marks around it because nobody does emphasis like the Spanish: ¡TWO MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND VOTES! That’s the mark Rock the Vote broke this last Tuesday. We have registered two-and-a-half million voters online and in person. Amazing. The registration deadlines have mostly passed by now, but two-and-a-half million new registrations mean that a whole lot of young new voters will make it to the polls. They may make the difference in this election.

It’s been 45 days now that we have been on the road and nowhere is it more measurable than in our waistlines. We have, to put it gently, become a touch portly. Perhaps pleasantly rounded or festively plump. We have, in short, gained some weight. This isn’t surprising. With some few exceptions, we usually stop in restaurants where you have to request silverware; the toast choice is between ‘white’ and ‘Texas;’ ranch dressing is served with your soup; and they would be happy to fry your salad if you asked.

Between stops, we keep ourselves well nourished with that same combination of jerky, soda, snack chips, and candy that has given long-haul drivers their robust good health. To supplement this diet, we encourage a strict regimen of no exercise. I myself do not do pushups every morning and I know that my sister, Willa, and the other members of the crew have made it a habit to get up early every morning in order not to jog, bike, or swim. It’s difficult to maintain such total indolence with a schedule as full as ours, but somehow we manage.

We’ve reached that point in our road trip where our daily routine no longer astonishes us. We get out of bed at whatever wretched hotel is housing us for the evening, meet in the lobby for straight-from-the-plastic-wrap danishes and ten-day-old hard-boiled eggs, then split into one of two vans or the bus. The highway between places is beginning to look the same and even the places have started to meld together.

It’s not altogether dissimilar from what the national press corps must feel. The reporters get on the plane, check the schedule to see where they’re headed, get off and are herded into a press area for an event that looks awfully similar to the last event. The candidate repeats his stump speech almost word for word. The reporters struggle to find something that distinguishes this speech from the last one. Then they send a piece to their editors and hop on the plane to do it all over again.

I knew reporters on John Edwards’ plane in 2004 who made chalk marks on the front wheel of the plane and then put $5 each into a cash pool. Whoever had the mark closest to the tarmac upon landing at the next stop won the pool. Plane-wheel roulette was the most exciting moment of most stops they made.

So thank god for rock stars and young people. Currently, we are doing concerts with Sheryl Crow, Santogold, and the Beastie Boys.  And Jack Johnson, who is – and I say this as a confident heterosexual male – a total dreamboat.

These are heavy hitting bands. More so than most we have dealt with. The bus tour crew has not quite adjusted to dealing with major celebrities.  We tiptoe past the Beastie Boys and stand staring at a spot near-but-not-too-near to Sheryl Crow.  Yesterday, one member of our crew drove the Beastie Boys to lunch.  He sat outside the restaurant while they ate.  No one told him they already had a ride home from their manager.  He just kept waiting in his van.  They are terribly famous.  He didn’t want to disturb their famous lunch.  He assumed famous lunches take longer than everyday lunches.  So he waited for three hours before we called to tell him the band had left.  This is how our brains have deteriorated.  Our basic logic functions are melted away by the presence of big musicians.  But we are acclimating slowly.  We better.  It’s getting late. Five days left.

 

Two bright spots:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/his-choice_ad/

The following was reported on NPR yesterday:
A factory training supervisor in rural Missouri said, "Rosa Sat so Martin could Walk; Martin Walked so Barack could Run; Barack is running so children can FLY".

It’s got to end soon. My behavior is disintegrating. I gaze at smog and get teary.  I burst into tears at the crowds of unemployed men in front of Home Depot hoping to pick up work.  I’m drinking too much. I grab food from other people’s plates, people I don’t even know.  I’ve stopped putting on makeup or exercising or fixing my hair.  Sam assures me I still have my looks but he’s afraid I’ve forgotten where I’m keeping them.  So we’ve left the Midwest and come home to Washington and will spend the last 12 days working in Virginia.
 
In spite of my anxiety, the places we’ve been spending most of our time in the last five months are looking pretty good.  McCain has pretty much given up on Colorado, where there will be appearances by the Obamas and Hillary Clinton in the next week.  There is intense Latino barnstorming around the state with Governor Richardson and Senator Salazar.  About a fourth of the state has already voted and it’s expected that 1.5 million are likely to do early voting, decidedly favorable for Democrats.  Younger voters are not turning out at the levels anticipated, but last time young voters and Independents were the least prone to vote early.
 
Take the Kerry states from 2004, add Colorado, Iowa and New Mexico, and it puts Obama with 273 electoral votes.  If he should get Ohio -- and pollster.com says it is leaning toward Obama -- that takes it to 306.  Montana, North Carolina, Missouri and Indiana are too close to call.  And who knows what’s actually going on in Florida and Pennsylvania  -- even though the polls show Obama with leads and there is no real reason to doubt them.  We know there will be a hidden anti-Obama vote, but I have long believed there will also be a hidden pro-Obama vote. It’s all beginning to look bluish.
 
Now onto another senate race.
 
My daughter Willa says, “You are a one-woman campaign to make DC smokin’ hot.  Future interns of America will thank you.”
 
It’s true that several of the races we’ve spent time following have a certain sex appeal (see Scott Kleeb and Martin Heinrich), and now I’m adding one more to that list.  Nonetheless, I insist my interest in Oklahoma’s Andrew Rice has to do with competence not countenance.
 
If Rice is to beat Inhofe, he has to match Inhofe’s TV time in the final 12 days.  The campaign’s final TV buy is tomorrow morning and they desperately need another $15,000. A contribution of any size will help.  Oklahoma is a relatively inexpensive market -- a spot on an Andy Griffith rerun only costs $15. Time on The View sells for $130 per 30 seconds. They can even advertise on the Today Show for only $250.
 
Inhofe is up by 12 points in current polling but he was up by 22 points a month ago.  It’s a long shot.  No question.  Remember, Oklahoma did give Eugene Debs his Second highest percentage vote in the country in 1912.  Also, Woody Guthrie and Fred Harris come from Oklahoma.  Do it for them.
 
https://services.myngp.com/ngponlineservices/contribution.aspx?X=Tb%2fj2kIF7fJ3Jn5xwfsjNw%3d%3d
 
This race, like Nebraska, is not on the “likely to win” list.  In fact it is on the solid red list.  But there has been little polling, and what there has been, shows Inhofe with very low positive ratings.  This is the kind of race that can only be won in a total wave year.  So if you believe in the wave, this is a place to throw a wish in the water and hope it will wash up on friendly shores.
 

Andrew Rice and Sam Brown
 

Andrew Rice with his wife Apple and son Noah.  Another one-year old son, Parker is not pictured.
 
For more on Andrew Rice, go to:
http://www.andrewforoklahoma.com/free_details.asp?id=45

 
What could feel more like finding the Holy Grail then taking back Dick Cheney’s seat in Wyoming?
 
Gary Trauner was sipping red wine in 8 Rivers, a new Caribbean restaurant in Denver, dressed in his standard cowboy boots, jeans, blue shirt and jacket. The last two days were typical ones.  He had driven from Cheyenne, Wyoming to Jackson Hole late in the day so he could make it to his son’s ninth birthday celebration.  After the party, he drove back to Cheyenne where he caught a plane to Los Vegas for a fundraiser and then on to Denver where Sam and I met him at another fundraiser.  Fundraising is what congressional and senatorial candidates do about 90% of the time.  They have to.  It’s not just a campaign strategy; it’s the campaign strategy. Two years ago before starting his campaign, Mark Udall was showing Trauner around Washington.  When Trauner asked to make some money calls back home, Udall took him to a room at the DNC called “Call Time”.  “I was hoping you might not see that that room existed,” said Udall.  “It might make you change your mind.”
 
Because of his run two years ago, Trauner has terrific name recognition.  He’s walked the precincts.  They recognize his slim frame and the squeaky-clean look that comes with balding heads.  They’ve shaken his hand and talked to him.  “This time they don’t dismiss me as that ‘liberal freak’.” But he also has a harder race in several ways.  Barbara Cubin, his opponent in 2006, was a wing nut even by Wyoming standards.  Two years ago when Sam and I were raising money for Trauner, I wrote about her confrontation with the wheel-chair bound, Libertarian candidate in Wyoming when she yelled “if you weren’t sitting in that chair, I’d slap you across the face!”  She was a lazy and unappealing candidate with a dismal legislative record, but she was also a six term incumbent with huge name recognition.  On election night Trauner was actually up 200 votes at midnight but had lost by about 1,000 votes once they were all counted. 
 
Cubin retired this year after her overly long and undistinguished career.  His current opponent, Cynthia Lummis, a long-time member of the Wyoming legislature and former state treasurer, is neither so well known, nor so extreme.  Her campaign has made mistakes including a rather stupid call-in by her press secretary (formerly Cubin’s press secretary) to a Trauner radio interview using a fake name, claiming to be a supporter and then asking whether Trauner “would support Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats energy bill?”.  Saying ‘Pelosi’ is pretty much akin to saying ‘the devil’ in Wyoming.  But, oops, she called on her cell phone, which showed up on the caller ID at the radio station.
 
As of Friday polls showed the race as essentially a tie.  Lummis’s hometown newspaper the Cheyenne Wyoming Tribune Eagle endorsed Trauner.  Also, this year the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee seems to have caught on that Wyoming may be winnable and has long had Trauner on their “Red to Blue “ list, although Charlie Cook still rates it as a dark red “likely Republican”.
 
Undoubtedly it is a hard year for Democrats in Wyoming.  Obama will lose by huge margins – the polls say over 25% -- and is not running a campaign, so there is not the same voter ID and turn out operation that is at work in many other marginal races, and the Republicans are throwing the kitchen sink at Trauner. “You need a steel stomach for this race,” he says, “my nine-year-old has come crying to me about the lies he’s heard on TV.  Before I even had the birds and the bees talk with him, I had to have the political talk.”
 
As a candidate, Trauner lets you know what he would be as a legislator. It’s all good.  “I’ll answer anything,” says Trauner who is known as a straight talker, even where people don’t like what he’s saying.  “If it’s too personal, you can ask my wife. She isn’t here, of course,” he laughs.  “I’m looking forward to spending time at home again, but meanwhile, I know every good and bad restaurant in Wyoming, every grocery store, every gas station.  When you lose a race by the small margin I did, you keep thinking ‘maybe if I had just talked to one more grocery clerk’.”
 
“Two years ago the issue was Iraq, but like everywhere, now the issues in Wyoming are gas and groceries; the economy,” says Trauner. “And health care.  It’s a bad joke, but our health care is killing us.”
 
“As to the economy, this crisis is the direct result of eight years of thinking that markets don't need regulation or accountability, that we don't need rules or don’t need to enforce the ones that exist.  If the Denver Broncos got rid of the rules and took out the referees in the third quarter, what do you think would happen?  People would be getting killed, that’s what. We have to resist the siren call that a free market solves everything. But my opponent only offers simple slogans like free markets and lower taxes and cutting wasteful spending," Trauner said.  This was in late August.
 
You have to love a guy who, as a candidate, actually had an understanding on the financial crisis -- before it happened.
 
His opponent, Cynthia Lummis, is aloof, with the kind of arrogance and sense of entitlement that comes from living in a state with a long-time, one-party rule. Trauner addresses this in his stump speech.  “What we've been practicing here in this country is the politics of fifty percent. You get career politicians that only talk to the people they think will support them or give them money or vote for them. And that's something we need to change. I was speaking to someone from the Petroleum Association not that long ago, and he looked at me at the end of the lunch--I didn't think I was going to get his vote -- good guy, good lunch -- and he said, "You know what, Gary? You didn't have to come do this today." I looked at him and said, "You know what, Bruce? Yeah, I actually did. Because if I win this seat, I'm going to represent you and the people that you represent just as much as I represent anyone else in this state."
 
With your help, this is a race we can win.  But it needs your help:
 
://www.actblue.com/contribute/entity/18216
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

It’s gotten frantic and treacherous out there.  The debates are over but the campaign goes on and on . . . and on.  We need it to be over, but there’s still so much to be done.  And will it even be over when it’s over?  As the TV ad says: If you experience an election lasting more than 17 days, consult your doctor.

Anything can and will happen.  Who would have guessed that the glow from the convention would have lasted less than a few days?  In some battleground states, there are six different abortion and terrorist attack ads out.  The campaign is effective in its response, but it’s a hard game of Whack-A-Mole. The polls are bound to drift back and forth in the next two weeks, but remember the Obama campaign is stronger in the battleground states than it is nationally.  Those of you in non-swing states won’t see what’s really happening.  Yesterday there were huge lines in North Carolina for early voting.  Almost half of Colorado voters have requested mail-in ballots.  In Georgia (not exactly what we can call a battleground yet), 250,000 registered for early voting. If we can just get out the already registered Democratic voters in Florida who didn’t vote last time, we’re ahead of the game (500,000 young people and 900,000 African Americans).  That doesn’t even count those registered since 2004. Even in the other fragile, non-regional battleground area — that of older Jewish voters in Florida and various suburbs like Cleveland – Obama is doing better than either Gore or Kerry did.

The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee just came into Nebraska for Scott Kleeb, indicating they think his race is in play. Nebraska!  Kleeb is running against the anti-regulatory hack and former Nebraska governor and Bush Secretary of Agriculture, Mike Johanns.  Kleeb has a punchy ad worth your time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23DQoY0lOMs

Some local polls have Obama and McCain tied in the second district in Nebraska, which will certainly have coattails for Kleeb and fivethirtyeight.com reports that internals on some polls suggest that the first district may also be in play.  Obama is using Omaha TV for the Iowa race so in a wave election even the Nebraska senate seat may be in play.

If you need more motivation to get out and work, be sure to watch my friend Sherry Jones’ “Torturing Democracy” on PBS.  You have to check local listings but it is on in Washington DC tonight, Friday, October 17th. The 90-minute film is also available on the website, www.torturingdemocracy.org, that has been developed in collaboration with the National Security Archive at George Washington University.  For those of you elsewhere, there’s a list of stations/times/dates on the website.  Click on the “More” tab – and then “Broadcasts.”  This is a program that PBS said they "couldn't find a time to run" before January 21.  After you see it you will know why some people might not want it broadcast before the election.  And you will wonder why John Yoo still has a job at UC Berkeley and George Bush wasn't impeached. 

 

From my son Nicholas Brown who is traveling with and writing for Rock The Vote Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Young voters registered yesterday – 13,569

Miles traveled today – 378

8:04 p.m. CDT – Between Minneapolis and Omaha

This is far too beautiful a country to let it all go to hell. Even on an overcast day, tearing through the swampland in southern Minnesota, you can’t help but stare at a dilapidated barn on the side of the road or a long prairie vista. Photography can’t capture the wonder of traveling through the open vistas of America.  Photographs taken behind the bug-encrusted, front windshield of the bus can’t even come close.

We are in the American heartland now, but it is a rapidly changing heartland. Apple pie, family farmsteads, and rows of corn are competing with sushi, wind farms, and cornrows. And speaking of newer hairstyles: we are dashing towards Omaha for a concert with Murs (http://www.myspace.com/murs) tomorrow.

To those who haven’t spent much time in, and I use the term lovingly, the fly-over states, it may seem that ‘Rock’ is as out-of-place in Omaha as a cruise ship. Not so. My family is from Omaha and my cousin still lives here, happily drumming away in a metal band. The youth in the Midwest scream for music and politics as much as anywhere. Nor is that necessarily a recent development. Speaking of the 1930’s Kansas City, another midwestern hub, biographer David McCullough writes:

“Forty dance halls and more than a hundred nightclubs were in operation offering... some of the best blues and jazz to be heard anywhere in America... This, too, was heartland America, no less than the old-fashioned, country-town peace and quiet...”

Not that we are here to engage in anything so reckless or debauched as blues or jazz. I merely point out that New York and LA, the traditional homes of Rock, ought not to be allowed exclusive claim to the unrest that spawns music and political activism.

No, this is far too beautiful a country to let it all go to hell and young Midwesterners realize that as well as anyone.

 

--Nick Brown

I’ve been sick in bed with a nasty bronchitis for five days.  So, I have watched about 50 hours of day-time television, including many hours of Fox News and probably five or six hours of political attack ads.   No kidding.  What’s more, I’m in Colorado, a major undecided state.  The political discussion is depraved.  Many people really believe Obama is a Muslim.  It would be a test of McCain's soul if someone were to ask him about that tonight.  Sam tells me to watch the polls (the state polls, not the national ones) and stop watching TV, but I think he is wrong.  Voters in swing states -- and this appears to be the mother of all swing states -- are treated to a nearly endless barrage of political advertising and discussion.   In the first three days of my sickness, most of it was negative, disgraceful and cheap.  Then McCain switched to totally negative.  (Politico.com says it is only "mostly negative" because he has left the "Original Mavericks" ad on TV.)
A week ago, an Obama supporter asked David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, why the campaign wasn't hitting back and reminding people of the Keating Five and John McCain's Senate trial for corruption.  Alexrod demurred.  Yesterday, it became clear that the campaign had a plan.  They rolled out a 13-minute, high production-value video on its own sophisticated web site:
http://www.keatingeconomics.com/
One day after Politico reported the McCain decision to go entirely negative, the site went up.  It was preceded by a trailer sent to Obama's list of nearly 3 million donors with a teaser that the full movie would be available a few hours later.  As of this morning, there have been more than 1 million hits on the You Tube site in addition to an undetermined number on this direct, keatingeconomics site.  I don't know if it will reach the undecided audience, but it will certainly fire up Obama's base and give it new talking points and a strong message to send to wavering friends.   It reminds me of how far-sighted this campaign has been and how different from other campaigns with which we have worked in the past.  Many of you may have read Ryan Lizza's New Yorker magazine piece about Obama in his early Chicago days.  It deeply upset the campaign (they excluded Lizza from the Obama Iraq trip) because it detailed Obama's willingness to play the Chicago political game.  Sam and I loved it.  It gave us hope that Bob Schrum's bad judgment from 2004 would not be repeated in 2008.  The cliché for this is ‘you don’t bring a knife to a gun fight’.  And sure enough, they had a loaded gun.  It is probably safe to assume that McCain's ties to the Russian oligarchs and the gambling industry and his running mate's crazy husband and church among other juicy topics are in waiting.  So, if Sarah Palin and John McCain want to play the Ayers/Wright game, I bet we are ready.
Now I have a modest suggestion.  Take a look at:
http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/39179-mccain-s-youtube-problem-just-became-a-nightmare
Then imagine this three minutes cut up into 30-second spots: Iraq, Baghdad, Iran (this one has the double advantage of making Lieberman look a fool); Katrina; economics twice; and tax cuts.  With enough money, it could be a hit TV miniseries: "The McCain Nightmare".  But this may be too rough for Obama.  Where are the 527's now that we need them?
My second suggestion is to go straight at the Maverick tag line.  My friend Danny Menaker suggests James Garner, a good Democrat, make an ad pointing out that the character he played was in the old west -- not in the last century, but the one before, an era of gunslingers and gamblers.  We don't need either of those in the White House now.  We need someone of proven intelligence and calm demeanor.  That is Barack Obama.  Another way is to get Terrellita Maverick, an 82-year-old direct descendent of the original Samuel Augustus Maverick whom the NYT wrote about on Sunday to make an ad.  Imagine her voice, slightly quivering with outrage, reminding people that her great grand daddy (or whatever) was the original Maverick and he was called that because he refused to brand his cattle.   ‘John McCain carries the brand of GWB on his voting record and it should be stamped on his forehead.’  Here she could wink at the audience and add ‘He ain't no Maverick.’

Despite a Herculean effort on Senator Biden’s part, I’m sorry to announce that the end result of the vice presidential debate is the demise of the letter “G”.
 
“I’ve got the greatest respect for its past service,” said Ms. Palin, “but gol darn it, the pesky lil rascal was just gettin’ in the way, bless its heart.  It’s time for a change.”
 
 

 
For those of you who have not seen this site, it is very powerful.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2VFRt5W4FM&eurl=http://icechewer.blogspot.com/
 
*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *
 
Unless Sara Palin wets her pants on stage tonight, she’ll be declared the winner.  And even then, she’ll win over the Depend vote.  She’ll be charming, “feisty”, and anecdotally folksy.  I hope Biden will come out swinging and allow for none of it.  Attack the ticket from the top, uncover every past McCain vote.  Debate McCain, not Palin.  Fill the studio with hot coals so there’s nowhere for her to step.
 
And then tomorrow we can fill the airwaves with cozy Biden stories, like the following one from Christina Ritch:
Our daughter Nina, was in the process of switching her working career from politics to teaching.  She went back to school to get her Master's in Education. My husband John was chatting with Biden and told him Nina loved the classroom but felt insecure about her choice because so many of her friends didn't consider teaching middle school a serious job. "That really makes me angry," Biden said, "Jill has been a teacher all of her professional life, and we need more people like that. Give me Nina's address. I'm going to write and tell her I'm proud of her and how important her job is." A week later, Nina received a letter from him saying just that. She treasures it.
 
Or this story also from Christina: Biden and I were contemplating the pastry table at a British Embassy tea party for Queen Elizabeth II. We recognized B.B. King across the room.  Biden dragged me over to the blues master and said, to the obvious delight of B.B., "Everyone here came to see the Queen, but I came to see the King!"
 
But we’ll wait until tomorrow to tell these sorts of stories.  Tonight, I hope he’ll be a warrior.  I want to sit in the dark, drinking wine and hear the drums beat.

Here are some excerpts from our son Nicholas Brown’s blogs from the Rock The Vote bus as it travels around Ohio.  The number of younger voters registered through activities of Rock The Vote is remarkable.  The bus tour registers in person, but many multiples of that "live" number register through the Rock The Vote web site.  The number at the beginning of each day's summary below is the total number registered both through the bus tour and the web site.

Friday, September 26th
Young voters registered yesterday: 19,441
Miles traveled today: 86
This afternoon’s performances by Ben Taylor and Hawthorne Heights were pleasant and fairly mellow. When Taylor broke out his folk songs some of the students sat on the grass and leaned back on their hands. You could imagine it was an earlier era and we were sitting back in Northern California with flowers and good intentions. Fury and conflict are pretty foreign to this tour; most people pretty much agree that registering voters is a good thing.

Come to think of it, about the closest thing we have had to hostility came last night on the bus when we parked outside of Cleveland’s House of Blues. It went like this:

A grizzled old man dashed up onto the bus. He stepped uncomfortably close to me and demanded, “Do you work here?” I watch movies, so fantasies of what happens next are not hard to come by. Maybe he is mad at our parking job. Perhaps he had an old grudge against one of the musicians whose pictures are printed on the bus walls. Maybe he has a gun. When I am alone, I imagine myself reacting like an action hero in these situations: a quick karate chop and this nefarious stranger is on the floor clutching his throat. In reality, I stand paralyzed.

“You work here?” he asks again, stepping closer. There are two staffers in the entryway to the bus. We’re both over six feet in the prime of our youth. Maybe we are little out of shape but we are certainly physically prepared to defend our turf.

“... I take pictures,” I stutter. I am about as intimidating as Stuart Little.

“Who works here?” He demands again with a little forward jerk of his head. This man has tattoos. And a hat. And white, dry whiskers. He could probably eviscerate me with his thumb.

Kim - a 5’6”-tall perky midwestern redhead and our political director - steps forward.

“I work here,” she says. It is a glorious and heroic moment.

The stranger pauses. He stares her up and down. I tense up, prepared for sudden violence.

“I’d like to register to vote,” he says.

There is another long pause, as if someone had just announced to Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday, and the Clantons that thanks, but no the OK corral gunfight will not be necessary this afternoon.

Then, of course, things calm down completely and I feel like a buffoon.

If anything, I am feeling a little too accustomed to good will and good intentions.

 
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Young voters registered yesterday: 18,486
Miles traveled today: 161

The headlong charge: from Cleveland to Columbus, arriving at 2:15 am for a four hour nap before an early morning zombie-stumble to the car, coffee, and the Ohio State tailgate.
The good news is that we did good work. In three hours we registered 112 voters, hosted two concerts, and heard ‘Hang on Sloopy’ (the official song of both Ohio State University and the state of Ohio) at least four times.

Ohio State games pull a crowd. Today’s official figure was 105,175. We saw a good solid portion of them as Double Barrel and Downplay played in front of the bus and they are registering and interested. As anyone watching the 2004 election can attest, Ohio matters. With roughly 120,000 votes cast differently, the election would have run the other way. If this football game and the tailgate party around it wanted to, they could probably determine the next president of this country.

Of course we’re not the only ones who see this. Every major voter-registration organization in this country has its shock troops on the ground here trying to expand the electorate. On the more active campuses we have visited, it’s a surprise if we don’t run into some hyper-political student or non-profit employee registering voters... 

Sunday, September 28, 2008
Young voters registered yesterday — 12,399
Miles traveled today — 103

9:36 pm - Some — in fact the bulk — of our hotels should go down in infamy as miserable slimy hovels fit for criminals or travelers from a prior century. Our production manager, Mary, has slept fully clothed for most of the tour because she fears what creatures may infest her bedding.

That said, the last two nights have been an exception. Whoever created or governs the Comfort Suites somewhere near the Buckeye’s stadium in Columbus, Ohio should be treated like a conquering general during a homecoming parade. Real comforters! Clean floors! Sure, the fitness center was a joke, but there was a pool! A pool! Angels manned the front desk and I actually turned two years younger when I drank from the fountain in the lobby. So here’s some advice to the Columbus-bound: keep this place in mind.

In point of fact, Columbus as a whole treated us absurdly well. We hit Due Amici on Gay Street (really) where we had one of the few excellent meals of this trip and then headed to the bars and clubs to impel the late-night drunkards to register.

After leaving the brief Eden of our Columbus hotel, we celebrated Sunday morning, as one must: with a bullhorn, speakers, and half-wakened students.

Wilberforce University, the oldest private black university in the country, is situated well away from the hubbub and fury of the city. Large parts of the student body head home for the weekends and those who stay probably don’t expect to be roused: “Students of Wilberforce. Wake up! You must vote for your future! Our ancestors died for this right!” Cyrus, a student at the school and a volunteer for Rock the Vote, bellowed at the walls.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Young voters registered yesterday - 20,963
Total voters registered yesterday - 29,445
Miles driven today - 104 so far


4:13 pm - Today marks the first day of early voting in Ohio. From now until Election Day, anyone who turns up at the county board of elections during business hours can vote or register or both without further ado. This morning, we returned to Wilberforce University and bussed some 60 students to the county office to vote early.

The ‘youth vote’ gets disparaged pretty regularly, and it’s true that we haven’t turned out as much as we maybe should have in the past. But you have to remember that the campaigns themselves wouldn’t exist without the fiendishly devoted young people who act as their shock troops. For every apathetic kid who claims that his vote just doesn’t matter, there is a half-crazed activist fighting against the injustices of the world.

Of course, in politics as in romance, it’s easy to fall into cynicism. You work for a guy for a while and it stops being about issues. You feel a connection. Your candidate understands you. He’s your friend, albeit one you’ve never met. And then he loses and the bottom falls out and everything you worked for seems pointless and foolish. It’s that same old sob story: guy meets candidate, guy falls for candidate, candidate loses, guy ends up broken and alone only to realize that that quirky best friend he’s known since the beginning of the film is the real candidate.

Or... well... the romantic-comedy/election-cycle comparison is not an exact metaphor. I am just saying it’s easy to lose faith in the system when things don’t turn out how you think they should... Think of the non-voters in this election as the cantankerous old hermits who have been used and beaten by the world and will never love again. And then there are the voters. Voting is an affirmation of life. It is a way to have a voice your country’s leadership and through that your country’s future.

And, all right, admittedly, it’s not nearly so stirring to bus someone to the county election center as it is to watch the band geek finally get the girl of his dreams, but if you look for it, there is something touching about a busload of first time voters and the young activists who are needling them on to the polls.

--Nick Brown