Knock Knock

coco_b  and I decided to drive up to New Hampshire today to volunteer in Salem for Barack Obama.  I was really reluctant, but Corinna felt that since there wasn’t much to do here in Massachusetts to help him win, but NH is still up in the air, and even though it’s a small state, every state counts..   So I sucked it up, we woke up at 8am and drove to Salem to meet at the campaign’s field office.  After a little primer on how to approach people, we were given our list of 80 addresses and sent on our way.  It took a little while to build up the stones to really start doing it, but we just dove in and started knocking.  Turns out, not many people were actually home…  As to be expected, there were also a fair number of people who just refused to talk, although not a single person was rude to us.  For the most part, the people we encountered either politely told us they weren’t interested in speaking, or that they already supported one of the candidates..  We did encounter a few undecided voters, and we gave them the rundown and some literature.   I have no idea if we swayed them our way, but they seemed receptive.

At the end of the day, we ended up only doing 69 of the 80 addresses, as we ran out of steam and out of time.  When we turned in our packet, we were unsure how it would be received, it seemed like we only actually talked to a handful of people (maybe 20/69 tops, and 10 of them politely refused to talk).  This seemed like nothing to us, but the organizer though it was great that we made it through 69and with our final tally report.  Before talking to him were a little let down, but once we thought about it, our opinion turned around…   Of course there would be a bunch of people not home on a Saturday afternoon..  And of course there’d be plenty of people who didn’t want to talk to anyone at their front door, regardless of what they were pimping…

It was tiring and a bit intimidating, but at the end of the day we felt good about volunteering and actually putting something other than our money where our mouth has been…

Review: Frontrunner

“Frontrunner” follows
the presidential campaign of Dr. Massouda Jalal, a woman who ran in
the 2004 Afghanistan presidential election. The film moves from her
impressive performance in the 2002 interim presidental election through her
2004 campaign. Jalal entered a heated political environment emerging from
Taliban rule, and seeing the struggles and successes of her campaign was
fascinating as an outsider.

While this subject was fascinating, the film itself was a bit
disappointing. I just don’t believe there was enough meat for this to be a
90-minute feature film. Sometimes, instead of using other techniques to
communicate some of the periods of waiting, the film just showed the
waiting. This might have been fine once or twice, but it felt overused in
this film. I also would have liked to see more interviews with the
public, both her supporters and her detractors.

This wasn’t a bad film, but I think it may have been better as a
60-minute PBS special (or if it had had more of the public voice).