And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed. “
…
Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;
And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

– Genesis 19:17, 24-26 (KJV)

If the Obama campaign entails a fairy tale, then my own bit of magical thinking involves the conviction that if we could only collectively suspend our disbelief for just long enough, if we can just have faith that something new can transcend what was, then we can cross the chasm that divides our nation. But like all magical thinking, there’s also a catch: to walk on thin air we must, all of us, believe it together. Open our eyes, and the magic breaks. The hopes that buoy us halfway across proves more fatal than staying exactly where we are.

Rationally, of course, I don’t quite believe this story. All politics are in the system, and all our politicians merely players. But I also believe in mankind’s occasional capacity to transcend itself and its own institutions. I’ve always considered JFK a rather bad President by the merits, and yet his overall power to inspire was clearly greater than the sum of his policies and actions.

Presented with the opportunity to move forward and leave behind our place of damnation, how many of us would nonetheless do as Lot’s wife did — whether out of fear, doubt, perhaps even mere nostalgia? How many would look back?

This Presidential campaign isn’t a battle between black and white: it is, as Obama himself observed, about the past versus the future. And the forces of the past — whether in the guise of Hillary Clinton or Jeremiah Wright — keep shouting, “Look back! Look back! You are doomed by the weight of the heavy hand of history.”

Perhaps we are. But I will keep walking this chasm, my wide-open eyes firmly forward.

(Cross-posted to Off the Bus)

At about 7:45pm last night, at the eastern edge of Hunting Park in northern North Philadelphia, I knocked on a voter’s door with a last-minute reminder to get down to the polls only three blocks over. “You mean the voting is still open?” the woman asked. Yes, I reassured her, she still had 15 minutes to cast her ballot. “Oh dang, I didn’t know that!” After many fruitless door-knocks, I was excited to put a vote in the bag for Obama.

Then a girl shouted from inside the house, “Yeah go vote for Hillary!”

I had a sudden flashback to the moment in 2004 when I realized that our Boston phonebank was mobilizing Republicans in Ohio because we were working off bad lists. Somewhere along the way, Obama’s famed field operations had tripped up.

The first warning for me that something was amiss came on Monday morning at the North Philadelphia Obama for PA field office, where Black Philadelphia blends into Latino Philadelphia. Campaign organizers gave us walklists for the local neighborhood to drop doorhangers. These lists, they assured us, were confirmed Obama supporters. Looking at the number of Latino names, I rejoiced: finally we were making inroads to Clinton’s core demographic. It took only a few addresses on the list sporting Hillary signs to disabuse me of that optimism. Despite the campaign being on the ground in force for six full weeks leading up to election day, we were still cold-calling the day before.

Apparently, North Philly was understaffed, and had been since early on. On Primary day I did my last canvass with two locals who complained that, despite signing up to volunteer many weeks ago, they were never activated. Meanwhile, phonebank and canvass lists piled up, even as places like West Philly saw so many volunteers that they redistributed to SW Philly.

The failure to ID voters over the six weeks’ reprieve between primaries had measurable impacts on turnout operations in North Philly: not only did we risk mobilizing Clinton supporters, but we were drastically less efficient when we were chasing all voters everywhere in the neighborhood. Sure, we had done something similar in South Carolina, where the campaign strategists decided with just over a week left to target all African-Americans, whether they were positively ID’ed or not. But the SC campaign had only done this after polls confirmed that such voters would break very decidedly for Obama. If that was the assumption in Philadelphia, it was a bad one, because across the doors I’d knocked, there was also strong support for Hillary among a sizable minority of black voters.

As the smallest cog in a campaign’s machinery, I can’t really evaluate the overall strategy, although having seen the inner workings of Obama’s South Carolina operations, I have some hunches. It may well be that the statisticians and other campaign pros in the HQ “boiler room” saw patterns or gaps emerging that they needed to exploit or plug up. Indeed, sometime around the 5pm mark, the “last call” for operational redeployment, word apparently came down from central HQ to the North Philly office to redeploy canvassing teams out to the north North Philly satellite, where the organizer was in near-panic over the amount of turf still left to cover. That’s how I ended with the virgin walklist that put me out past Hunting Park.

Not that I saw a single Clinton volunteer covering any of the same turf, either. If Clinton had a ground campaign in Philly doing anything more effective than holding up signs, it must have been underground. Yet her supporters came out in sufficient numbers even without a solid ground push to cut meaningfully into Obama’s share of Philadelphia voters.

It could well be that intense GOTV efforts are overrated in effectiveness. Indeed, after threatening to go cast her ballot for Hillary, the woman I spoke with in the last few minutes of voting yesterday instead headed over to the local store to buy some drinks. I didn’t see her at the polls later.

Today, with three different partners, I hit 10 “turfs” (bundles of voter addresses) in North Philadelphia. At about 100 addresses per turf, I estimate I hit about 500 voters with Obama door-hangers reminding them that tomorrow is election day and where their local polling location is.

GOTV — Get Out the Vote — is as brass-tacks as politics gets. The key to winning this battle is a combination of massive manpower and operational efficiency: preferably, you not only throw more people at the problem of reminding (cajoling, pleading with) voters to vote, but also get more work out of them in the precious few hours of voting in a day. (Pennsylvanians get a few more hours than the average American: 13, between 7am and 8pm).

Door-hangers are how you get to voters when you know they’re not home, as you’d expect on a Monday. Though many of the households we lit-dropped today had someone home, usually because they work night shifts or, as they day turned to dusk, people came home.

The section of North Philly we covered had an interesting mix of old-school public housing and new mixed-income developments. One project we covered was a throwback to the bad old days of public housing, an 11-story concrete monster where the stairwells stuck to your shoes for reasons you’d rather not guess. There were low-rises too, many with open front doors where we could blow through and hit every apartment with efficient alacrity.

There were also some nice redeveloped homes, including some that took the place of the infamous projects where Bill Cosby grew up. The residents there were as likely to be Latino (generally, Puerto Rican) as Black, and most were friendly. True to demographics, though, many were also Hillary supporters. (The less-friendly Hillary supporters, whom we encountered later in the day, lived in the rougher parts of the neighborhood).

Perhaps with these newer residents, the face of North Philadelphia will change once again, as it has before. One of the old Baptist churches in the neighborhood still bears the name of the Jewish congregation that erected the building in 1911. Perhaps in the coming decades it will morph once again into Catholic or Pentacostal.

Youth remain the most enthusiastic supporters of Obama — I persuaded (I think) many older teens who lamented being too young to vote to show up tomorrow and put in some hours volunteering. Younger kids just like saying the name “Obama.” (I’ve often joked that the power of Obama’s name is in melding the three most primal sounds humans can make – “O Ba (father) Ma (mother)”.)

I certainly hope they will show up, as so many of the voters on our lists were newly-enrolled, often the most difficult to turn out, even a campaign as large and well-organized as Obama for Pennsylvania can run low on volunteers. At the end of this evening, we still had a good pile of turfs yet unturned — first priority for us tomorrow morning at 7am. A great war journalist might pull a great story out of the front-line experience of American democracy. But a media obsessed with glitter, scandal, and pablum never notice the grassroots, and perhaps that is a blessing.