Being in South Carolina for the 7 days leading up to the Primary on Jan 29 was an amazing experience! I met volunteers from all over including, Texas, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, Illinois, and others from Florida. All of us were there to do what we could to help get Senator Obama elected. I also met some great locals and had a wonderful host, Mike, that let 9 of us invade his beautiful home and I stayed with him for the remaining week after the big group left. We were perfect strangers before and now I've added a new friend to my life.
I helped with door to door canvassing and phone banking to undecided voters to tell them about rally's where Barack or Michelle Obama would be speaking.
On Tuesday of that week, the phone I was using starting ringing back and people were asking me where their voting precincts were. As it ended up my phone line was part of the Voter Assistance HotLine being handled by a lawyer named John from Austin. He is a spitting image of Stephen King and he had instructed us all week that only a lawyer could answer those hotline calls.
He asked me if I had my computer with me and if I would be willing to take some calls. He had been working in the office for over 2 weeks to line up the lawyers that would be working in the field and in the boiler room on election day to handling any election fraud or irregularities that might come up. The 877 number had been on one phone and then suddenly it expanded to two lines and the later in the week would be 4 lines and on election day there would be 10.
He gave me the links to the Obama site and the South Carolina state voter registration site and said just to look up their voter registration and let him talk to them if they had any legal questions.
It was a bit chaotic and we managed and got into a rhythm. 90% of the callers wanted to know where to vote. The state made some ridiculous amount of precinct changes and didn't notify voters. So the campaign published the 877 number on every mailing, handout and tv commercial. Somewhere along the way, someone also said it was the truth squad number too. So anyone could call to tell us about anything. It became the main campaign line for the state.
And we got a fair amount of random calls about how the Senator needed to be tougher on the Clintons, how he needed to not stand down, we had lots of requests to pass along messages like we were his personal secretary. We had a few hateful calls. One really came unexpected for me and really shook me up. But we also had lots of supportive calls with people calling to say they just mailed their Absentee ballot for him or that they were supporting Obama and it was the first election they had voted in in 20 years. it was really inspiring.
On election day itself I ended up being the operations manager of sorts for the 10 attorneys that drove in from Washington, DC, etc.
In addition to voting location questions, people where calling to schedule rides to the polls or asking if they could just bring their ID with them or if they needed their voter reg cards.
The phones never really stopped ringing. All 10 lines for 12 hours. We estimate that we were answering about 500 calls an hour.
By the end of the day were were all exhausted and on caffeine and adrenaline highs. Then suddenly someone got a text at 7:01, one minute after the polls had closed that the AP was already calling the race for Obama! It was amazing. We really didn't have a feel for how anything was going all day.
We headed down to the Convention Center where he was going to be giving his speech. My legs where so tight and tired. I had not sat down for more than 5 minutes all day. But as Mike and I walked in to the convention center we both had a bounce in our step! We waited what seemed like an eternity for his speech to start. The crowd was pumped up and we'd yell different chants at different times. "Race doesn't matter". "Fired Up. Ready to go." "Yes We Can" CNN was broadcasting live and we'd erupt when the live shots came over the large screen.
Here's a video of the speech - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8mG5qfDXL4
We were only about 10 people deep but I quickly became surrounded by a wall of tall people and some of them not smelling too pretty. :) Definitely not the place to be if you are the least bit claustrophobic. Mike had a better angle than I did so I gave him my digital camera. It was such a commanding and inspiring speech! If you haven't watched it yet, please do!!! I found it on youtube when I was driving back to Florida the next day. I hooked it up to the speaker in the car and listed to it several times. Each time I started to cry. I wasn't able to completely take it in being their live for it. I was too exhausted and overwhelmed by the entire experience.
Without a doubt it was an amazing experience! I wish I could do more but I know we all do what we can!
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