I am a life-long Republican and I voted for McCain-Palin…
But just want to mention that when I showed up at our local Republican HQ to volunteer, the stuff members wouldn’t even hear anything that is not Windows based.
Right then (& among many other things), I know the battle is over. Not just this one, but many more in the future.
Finally, it seems that I wasn’t the only one to notice the correlation between open source software and Obama’s grass-roots and people-powered campaign. Watch Republican strategist Alex Castellanos discuss the topic (thanks to Simon Phipps for the link):
2. Jan Hejtmanek received less than 25% of the vote in her bid to unseat state representative Amy Stephens, who made none of her positions known, depending only on the R after her name in this district in which Republicans significantly outnumber Democrats.
3. Proposition 8 passed in California. This initiative bans same-sex marriage in California, providing a huge setback for marriage equality and gay rights. This result is particularly disappointing to me. In 2000, when I was living in California, I worked against the original Proposition 22, which passed by a large margin at that time. I had hoped that society’s views on gay marriage had progressed since then.
Among the many pieces of good news from the election, here are nine reasons to celebrate.
1. My adopted state of Colorado has gone blue. In addition to giving our nine electoral votes to Barack Obama, we will now have a Democratic governor, two Democratic Senators, and five out of seven Democratic representatives. Some people are apparently blaming an influx of California liberals on this shift. While I appreciate the complement, I don’t think we California liberals can take full credit
2. In my own El Paso County, home to Focus on the Family and other embarrassments, Obama received 40% of the vote. For comparison, John Kerry received only 32% of the vote in 2004. For months local Democrats have said that if Obama got 40% in El Paso County, he’d win the state. So I’d like to think that my work on the Obama campaign over the past couple months helped win the state for Obama.
3. The politics of hate and fear perpetuated by the McCain campaign and its allies (James Dobson, Fox News, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and so on) fell flat on its face. The American electorate didn’t fall for the lies that Obama is a Muslim, a terrorist sympathizer, a Marxist, or somehow not a “real” American.
7. Colorado and South Dakota both defeated anti-abortion measures, including Proposition 48 in Colorado, which would have defined life as beginning at the moment of conception. Yes, apparently its supporters really think that we can decide when life begins by voting on it.
8. Democrats will have a majority in both the House and the Senate.
9. Finally, and most importantly, we have a president-elect who is intelligent, thoughtful, forward-thinking, honest, inclusive, and downright inspiring. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch his victory speech here:
It’s time. If you haven’t already cast your vote for Barack Obama via early voting or an absentee ballot, get out and do it tomorrow! (Especially if you live in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Nevada, or Missouri).
In case you need some inspiration, here’s a short but effective video.
As the polls are now open in Colorado, we had a fun early-voting rally for Barack Obama yesterday here in Northern Colorado Springs. About 60 of us first gathered near Starbucks on Academy:
We then walked over to the Chapel Hills Mall, site of the polling place:
We assembled in the mall parking lot (safely outside the 100 foot limit for campaigning near a polling place):
After removing our Obama pins and leaving our signs behind, S. and I dropped off our mail-in ballots. Others in the rally also dropped off ballots or filled out a ballot on the voting computers.
The reception to the rally was generally positive, with quite a few people driving by vociferously honking their support. I think we showed that Northern Colorado Springs doesn’t belong exclusively to Focus on the Family and their ilk!
I did some data entry at my local Barack Obama campaign office earlier this week and was pleased to note that the computers were running the Ubuntu operating system. The web browser, of course, was Mozilla Firefox. Both Ubuntu (a Linux-based operating system) and Firefox are open source software, developed in a collaborative, community model. The open source movement started as a grass-roots effort that generated significant excitement among software developers, and one of the big draws of open source development is that it’s open to anyone to contribute as much or as little as he or she wants. Contributors to open source projects feel part of a larger community.
Thus, I find it particularly fitting that Barack Obama is using open source software in his campaign. Obama has inspired amazing grass-roots support and energy, and more excitement than I’ve ever seen for a presidential candidate. There are thousands of volunteers contributing their time and money to electing him president. Just like an open source project, those of us working on the campaign feel part of this “people-powered” community.
The decision to use open source software is truly a progressive choice. And, if Obama runs his presidency with the same transparency that is inherent in open source software, it will be a welcome change from the past eight years.
My mother had a great letter published today in the Santa Barbara News Press. Viewing it online requires a login, so here’s the full text:
John McCain’s tax credit of $5000 for health insurance is a drop in the bucket. My husband and I pay $1200 a month for self-employed health insurance premiums. That amounts to $14,400 a year. We still must pay $40 every time we see a doctor, and we each have a yearly deductible of $1500. After that deductible is met, our insurance pays only 80% of our health-care costs.
The $5000 in tax credits of McCain’s plan would just barely cover the increase in premiums and health care costs compared to last year. We would be no better off than we were a year ago
We don’t need a Band-Aid approach for the health-care crisis. Barack Obama’s plan offers the change we need to fix a health-care system that is broken. All of the other civilized countries in the world have taken steps to make sure that their citizens have affordable health care. It’s time for the U.S. to join the civilized world
The latest Republican talking point, as parroted by my local paper and Thomas Sowell, seems to be that the current economic crisis is not actually due to the deregulation of the investment banks and insurance companies. Instead, it’s because of the Community Reinvestment Act that encouraged housing loans to poor minorities.
In his excellent rebuttal in Slate magazine, Daniel Gross points out the absurdity of this line of reasoning. He says,
“…lending money to poor people and minorities isn’t inherently risky. There’s plenty of evidence that in fact it’s not that risky at all….
“On the other hand, lending money recklessly to obscenely rich white guys, such as Richard Fuld of Lehman Bros. or Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns, can be really risky. In fact, it’s even more risky, since they have a lot more borrowing capacity. And here, again, it’s difficult to imagine how Jimmy Carter could be responsible for the supremely poor decision-making seen in the financial system. I await the Krauthammer column in which he points out the specific provision of the Community Reinvestment Act that forced Bear Stearns to run with an absurd leverage ratio of 33 to 1, which instructed Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers to blow up hundreds of millions of their clients’ money, and that required its septuagenarian CEO to play bridge while his company ran into trouble. … How about the hundreds of billions of dollars of leveraged loans—loans banks committed to private-equity firms that wanted to conduct leveraged buyouts of retailers, restaurant companies, and industrial firms? Many of those are going bad now, too. Is that Bill Clinton’s fault?…
“Lending money to poor people doesn’t make you poor. Lending money poorly to rich people does.”
Since my last post about Joining the Obama Campaign I’ve gone into the local Obama campaign office about once a week to volunteer. Although I tried at first to convince the volunteer coordinators that I should do data entry, they’ve mostly had me making phone calls. The way it works is that I get a list of voters who by some algorithm have been designated as possibly undecided. Mostly, they’re registered as “Unaffiliated.” I was skeptical of the efficacy of making cold calls like this until I realized that the real point isn’t to convince people to vote for Obama (though that’s a bonus no one will turn down), but simply to identify Obama supporters. The campaign will then follow up with all the people who voiced their support for Obama to make sure they actually vote.
As one might imagine, I’ve had some interesting conversations. And I’ve mostly discovered that I’m not all that good at it. I don’t like to just read the script because I come across as, well, scripted. But when I try to speak off the cuff, I typically find myself coming up with good arguments about five minutes after someone’s hung up on me. Yesterday, for example, a woman said that she is part of a military family, and so she’s obviously voting for McCain. I made some weak and ineffective attempts to mention Obama’s votes in support of veterans’ care, the GI bill, and so on. But what I really should have done was start out by saying that I know many military families who are supporting Obama, and then ask her why specifically she thinks McCain will be better for military families. If she had said that it was because he’d actually been in the military, I should have said, “Great! Then I assume you’ll be supporting (Democrat) Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack for congress.” But sadly I missed that opportunity.
In another conversation yesterday, a young man started out by asking me if Obama was really going to take his guns away. I responded that the McCain campaign and special interests like the NRA have been spreading lies about Obama’s positions on gun control, and that he has no intention of attempting to overturn the second amendment. But the guy insisted that the attack ads must be based on something substantial, and probed me for details on specific bills that Obama has supported that might be construed as voting against gun rights. I of course didn’t have those details, but I did note his interest, and the office will send him some info on Obama’s positions on that issue. He seemed like a truly undecided voter, so maybe my ten-minute conversation and the campaign materials will sway him.
Luckily I didn’t get the woman who told the person making calls next to me that she couldn’t vote for Obama because he “likes to kill little babies.” There are plenty of reasonable arguments to be made that Obama’s policies on sex education and access to contraception will actually reduce the number of abortions more than will the failed Republican policies of abstinence-only sex ed. But I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to come up with cogent arguments on the spot any better than the shocked caller next to me. And really, I don’t think anything we could have said would have made any difference in that woman’s vote.
As yesterday was the deadline for voter registration in Colorado, the office was frantically trying to reach people who had filled out voter registration forms incorrectly. Many of the mistakes seemed to be from college students who don’t have a Colorado drivers’ license, so used their social security number as an ID. Unfortunately, the confusing Colorado registration form requires a box to be explicitly checked in that case saying that the voter does not actually have a Colorado ID. And given our Clerk and Recorder’s history, you can assume that he’ll toss out any ballot with even such a minor mistake. So I spent some time yesterday trying to reach the folks with mistakes in their registrations. I’m happy to report that I did save several registrations. Since these registrations are all from likely Democratic voters, I feel that I directly earned Obama several votes in Colorado Springs yesterday.
As a Barack Obama supporter, I don’t like to criticize his campaign. However, I feel compelled to point out their failure in one area: yard signs. It took me over a month to get an Obama yard sign. I first tried the local campaign office, which has been out of them for weeks (actually, they supposedly received a small shipment a couple of weekends ago, but the signs were gone within hours). I next attempted to order a sign from store.barackobama.com. Part of my order arrived promptly (pins and a t-shirt), but the yard signs and bumper stickers were apparently on back order. Four weeks later, I have no update from the store as to when the yard sign will be available, no one answers when I call the store, and no one returns my messages. This is not a good way to run a campaign store. I finally last week put in an order for an unofficial sign and bumper sticker from cafepress.com. The yard sign arrived this week, and I’m now proudly displaying it on my front lawn, along with signs for state and national representative candidates Jan Hejtmanek and Hal Bidlack.
If I’d waited for the official Obama sign, well, I’d still be waiting.
Obviously not everyone thinks that yard signs are important. Witness the comments to this post on Daily Kos, saying things like, “yard signs don’t vote.” I’d like to think that’s not representative of the Obama campaign’s position, but the evidence of taking over a month to make signs available in Colorado Springs begs otherwise.
I’m afraid the Obama campaign is making a mistake here. No, yard signs don’t vote. But the people who walk and drive by my house every day do. And you can’t underestimate the power of signs and bumper stickers as visible evidence of grass-roots excitement that can be contagious, or at the least make people (perhaps subconsciously) more likely to support Obama. Before I put up my sign, all indications were that everyone in my neighborhood was either for McCain or apathetic. There’s not another Obama sign in sight. That could easily push a fence-sitter to the McCain side. We’re all more peer-pressured than we like to admit, and yard signs give courage to people considering Obama, indicating that they’re not alone in their neighborhoods.
