Politics

I’ve landed in latte-sipping, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, um… scratch that. This afternoon my friend Baratunde and I canvassed southwest Philadelphia.

This is friendly territory for Obama, and if the strategists are right, the key to a a victory on Tuesday (however defined) will turn on the success of the ground game in ensuring that the supporters we identified today actually do vote. The neighborhood we canvassed was predominantly African-American and poorer, although individual houses and sometimes entire blocks seemed better-maintained than neighbors’. A surprising number of them were home (maybe about one-third) this Sunday afternoon, and they were very strongly pro-Obama. There were undecideds and Clinton supporters, to be sure, but the ratio was very high.

Although in some ways this part of southwest Philly is quite obviously different from Vermont, there were some similar features as well. A lot of doorbells didn’t work, and residents seemed to like keeping their doors open. Unfortunately it reminded me of Vermont in another way too: some of the places seemed possibly abandoned, and I saw at least one foreclosure notice, which had been affixed to the storm door.

I’m not sure if this is analogous to how people feel about the overwhelming electoral support African-Americans have been demonstrating for Barack Obama, but I’m bothered/embarrassed/angered by Chinese-Americans who came out yesterday in counter-protest to the anti-China rallies in San Francisco.

To the best of my knowledge, the protesters were out there criticizing Chinese policies, not the Chinese people. And I know that when international tensions get heated, sometimes there’s fallout for that nation’s diaspora (just ask German-Americans in WWI, or Japanese-Americans in WWII), but in this particular case — given that the main issue concern human rights, not trade — I can’t see what the negative effect would have been for Chinese-Americans. (Human rights activists are not known for giving a lot of beat-downs, physical, verbal, or otherwise).

So to counter-protest, and thus support the Chinese regime? Sorry folks, you’re on the wrong side of the issue here. And it’s embarrassing to have to assume that you’re on that side because of your ethnic heritage.

I got my first overtly racist anti-Obama comment today while phoning central Pennsylvania. It was a 62-year old man, who said, simply, “I’m not voting for the black man.” I moved to end the call, but he continued, “I’ve worked with hundreds of black people.” He meant that as a defense (”Some of them are my best friends!”), but the point was clear. At least he was honest.

It’s interesting, then, to see in today’s NY Times, and then echoed on Daily Kos, on-the-ground reporting from Levittown, PA. “Levittown is whiter, older and less educated than the rest of the nation — and Pennsylvania is made up of many Levittowns,” writes Michael Sokolove, a Levittown native. Perhaps I was calling into one of them.

I grew up a short bike ride from the original Levittown — Levittown, NY, the one featured in all the social studies textbooks. Actually, I grew up in what Bill O’Reilly calls “the Westbury part of Levittown,” which is to say, Salisbury. In 1981, my family moved to a split-level (so, not a real “Levitt” house) just off Old Country Road. By then, suburban New York was in flux, and I suspect it’s around then that Levittown NY took a different turn than Levittown PA. Maybe a third of my high school classmates lived in Levittown proper, and I remember, as the Cold War wound down, hearing rumor of Grumman’s shrinking fortunes as demand for its F-14 began shifting away.

Back then, blue-collar work meant a middle class lifestyle. But the economic shock of Gruman’s decline and ultimate sale, coming so soon after the 1987 recession, put Long Island on the path to a post-industrial future. From Stony Brook in the east, biotech was coming; from the west lapped waves of money from New York’s capital markets. Gruman was to Levittown NY what Fairless Works was to Levittown PA, but with the luck of geography the older Levittown escaped the millstone around its neck. (Ironically, Fairless Works is called “the mill”). Today, the median household income of Levittown NY is $78,454 to PA’s $58,985; industrial work comprises 17% of PA’s jobs but only 9% of NY’s. (Latest data for NY, PA).

In other demographic matters, the two Levittowns are almost identical. They also share a similar history. As Sokolove reports,

And on matters of race Levittown has a particularly shameful history. It was billed as “the most perfectly planned community in America,” and part of the plan was for it to be whites-only: 5,500 acres, stretching across three Pennsylvania townships and one borough, closed off to blacks. The first development of mass-produced homes by Levitt & Sons, Levittown, N.Y., on Long Island, which dates from 1947, had the same exclusionary policies. William Levitt weakly insisted that he would love to sell houses to black families but had “come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 to 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours.”

And so, as of 2000, both Levittowns were 94% white, with PA’s having a few more blacks and NY’s having more Latinos (many of whom are counted as white) and Asians.

The racial history of Long Island was sometimes written in stone, as in the low highway overpasses that Robert Moses allegedly designed to prevent New York City buses from reaching the beach. It’s also written on the crazily overlapping boundaries that divide up our school districts. Mr. O’Reilly might be excused for not knowing whether he hailed from Levittown or Westbury; my high school drew from both, plus East Meadow, and belonged to the East Meadow School District. (Two other school districts also covered Levittown.) Yet our school did not take students from the other side of Old Country Road, a majority black and Latino community known as New Cassel. Those kids went to Westbury High School, in the Westbury School District.

I was one of about a dozen Asian kids in my class of 181 (ours was the smallest class the school had ever seen), and I’m pretty sure the only non-Hispanic black kid in the class was in the special education program (he was deaf). Unlike Sokolove’s experience in 1950s PA, Jews were much more numerous in my high school, and especially my part of town; today, Jews comprise some 15% of Levittown NY but only about 5% of Levittown PA. And while I don’t have up-to-date demographics at hand, from what I’ve seen Levittown NY has become more diverse since the 2000 census, especially among Latinos and East and South Asians.

I can’t speak directly to the Levittown, proper, experience, but growing up in the next town over in the 1980s, my experience of race was — while not uncomplicated — not fraught with hatred or even significant overt prejudice. I don’t know if it was our particular generation (the youngest children of the oldest hippies), religious diversity, or — as some of my friends have suggested — high marijuana usage in my school, but when I compare notes with peers from other schools from elsewhere in the country, I do believe that I had a uniquely peaceful, even idyllic, childhood. Which is not to say that race never surfaced in ugly ways (in retrospect, I think the Archie Bunker lookalike next door hit golf balls on our roof on purpose), but that it wasn’t quite as simple as kids lining the halls making Chinkie jokes, either.

On the other hand, I wasn’t black.

Still, it frankly surprises me that I haven’t encountered any overt racism in working on the Obama campaign these past few months until tonight. Even if racism is out there, it’s shrouded in code words or perhaps lying to pollsters — which implies that even racists of the old-school sort know that the public consensus is against them. There’s a lot to be thankful about in terms of race relations in this country, and the Levittown that I know in New York gives me hope about the future. So, too, do some of the Levittown, PA residents that Sokolove reports on. Said John Annunziata, a former local politician, “When he won Iowa, it touched my soul. I was very emotional. I felt like we were moving toward what this country should be.”

One of our fellow Obama for SC volunteers, Allison Lane of Baltimore, MD, popped up on NPR this morning as an Obama canvasser at the old Reading Terminal in Philly. Listen to her mad canvassing skills and interview (4:19 - 4:48), who notes that Obama’s support can’t be about race because “we’re only, what, 12% of the population?” You can also catch a brief glimpse of her here (0:43 - 0:45).

Keep it up Allison; our hopes are riding on you and the thousands of other volunteers!

Dear Governor Patrick:

This supporter and volunteer still stands by you… but it’s been hard, and I fervently hope to hear you once again taking up the moral leadership that so many of us invested in you as governor of our Commonwealth.

I volunteered many hours helping you win the nomination and then the election because you had explained to us all what a “Commonwealth” means: that we all share in a common civic, economic, and political life, and that we are each others’ keepers.

It was time for us to face tough questions about whether “Commonwealth” was merely a word, or represented our actual commitments. And we and you all knew that at the end of the day, this meant that we would have to consider reasonable, fair, and sustainable sources of revenue to enable the Commonwealth to keep its promise to all of us.

You were able to connect revenues — or let’s just be clear here now, taxes — to values that we all share: better education, health care, services, infrastructure. So when you were elected, I was ready to take up the cause and join with you to close corporate tax loopholes and then embark on a serious conversation with my neighbors across Massachusetts about what our own commitment might mean.

I hope you can therefore understand my disappointment when, since last summer, you instead pursued an unfair, unsustainable, and immoral source of revenue from casinos. I know that we need the money, and we need it badly. But going down this path meant losing your moral legitimacy. It took us off the idea that taxes represent our shared commitments and instead echoed the false belief that we can magically meet the state’s needs without personal sacrifice.

So rather than putting my energy behind supporting all that you stood for, I instead worked against you to battle casinos in Massachusetts. And I take no great satisfaction in winning.

But the fact is that the issue is over, and I for one and ready and willing to again join with you again in seeking reasonable solutions to our Commonwealth’s fiscal crisis. It is not an easy task, but we didn’t elect you to take on the easy tasks. We supported you, urged our neighbors to vote for you, and ultimately elected you by an overwhelming majority because we have faith in your ability to lead us through the difficulties ahead.

I still have faith in your ability to do just that. Please don’t let me down.

Sincerely yours,

Gene Koo
Cambridge, MA

Sozi Tulante is a close friend of mine from college and law school. He’s a Congolese refugee, married to a British woman, and lives in Philadelphia. In short, he’s an American, and I’d like to post his response to Senator Obama’s speech from Tuesday:

I am writing to ask for your support. Yesterday morning, I was fortunate to be in the audience for Senator Barack Obama’s speech – really a discourse – about the role of race in American culture, history, and politics. Quite a heavy topic. Yet Senator Obama managed to pull it off, with nuance, grace, honesty, and balance, and in doing so gave a speech that will define a generation. Listen to or read the speech yourself, more than once if you have to.

The speech was hastily arranged, and invitations sent out with less than a day’s notice. So we expected, like any politician would, that Senator Obama would carefully jettison Reverend Wright, issue some safe bromides, then cross his fingers and pray that the issue would be considered settled. That is not what happened. Rather, he explored in the most personal and direct way possible the centrality of race, the quintessential American dilemma, and both the challenges that it poses to us all – Black, White, Asian, Latino – as well as the opportunity it gives us to start healing our racial divisions in honest – and sometimes painful – ways, beyond Benetton ads or videos of the Black Eyed Peas. I know his speech may not settle every skeptic, but, as someone else said, “Agree or disagree with Obama, I ask people who are less inspired by him than I am to at least acknowledge that in this presidential candidate, we have a man of honor–and an honest man.”

Here in Philadelphia we have started taking up the challenge that Senator Obama issued and started having these discussions about race. And over the last weeks, after work and on weekends, rain or shine, Meriel – an Oxford-born professor and linguist — and I – an Ivy-League educated, North-Philly raised Congolese refugee and cab-driver’s son –have asked hundreds of people to embrace Senator’s Obama’s vision for change and register to vote. Despite efforts by hundreds of volunteers like us, there is still much to do as the polls show Senator Obama trailing. Although we can always work harder, to close the deal the campaign needs funds for the next five weeks of canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts. Please contribute by clicking on the following link or if you cannot contribute kindly pass this e-mail along to someone you think would contribute:

Contribute to the Obama campaign

Anyone will tell you that listening to Senator Obama is a singular experience. Yesterday, though, there wasn’t the celebratory, whoopin’ and hollerin’ or the speech-interrupting-applause you find at the typical Obama event. It was more solemn, though no less inspiring. It is as though the 160 members of the audience – of all races – and the those watching on television or on youtube knew that on this occasion Senator Obama was only asking that we lend him our ears and attention for 40 minutes.

As Senator Obama pointed out, the history of race in America contains some of this nation’s most powerful moments, but also its most profound failures. Both these strands form the core of America. It’s true that “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Yet, yesterday morning he showed how he would handle a crisis: directly, calmly, and confidently, and in a way that addresses all Americans. He also signaled that we no longer have to wait for a while yet, maybe a long while yet, because the time is now, the place here, the people us. Please join us!

Best,

Sozi

Co-Chair Young Lawyers for Obama – Philadelphia Chapter

P.S: Below are my immediate thoughts on the speech:

New York Times
New York Sun

Sozi is, by the way, the guy holding the Obama sign in my earlier post about PA.

While Senator Obama’s address on Tuesday has largely been received as a call to national dialogue about race, the 37-minute speech also revealed much about his religious and spiritual views. In it, Obama clearly invokes core Christian principles and beliefs, from original sin to God’s grace. “Perfection” was his refrain – he invoked the word nine times – yet he did not use it to describe a teleological achievement, but rather a continuous mission of going on to perfection.

This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.
[emphasis added]

Salvation, in this view, is an ongoing process, not an outcome; a constant exercise of choice rather than a final destination. Known as “Christian perfectionism,” this idea is a cornerstone to the theology of John Wesley, a leader of the Methodist movement. Interestingly, the most powerful Methodist today – George W. Bush – appears to profess a very different view of perfection, one that involves accomplishing specific goals based on knowledge about God’s plan for the world:

The cause we serve is right, because it is the cause of all mankind. The momentum of freedom in our world is unmistakable–and it is not carried forward by our power alone. We can trust in that greater power who guides the unfolding of the years. And in all that is to come, we can know that His purposes are just and true.

Bush professses a theology of certainty: God’s will can be known — indeed, it has been revealed to us — and our task on earth is to realize it. By contrast, Obama offers a theology grounded in a process, not an outcome: to work out salvation with fear and trembling.

Obama’s professed beliefs puts him at odds not only with President Bush, but his own pastor. As he states emphatically, “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is… that he spoke as if our society was static.” Christian perfectionism, by contrast, sees imperfection as God’s challenge rather than fatalist destiny.

Some pundits and bloggers continue to ask why Sen. Obama has stood by a pastor with whom he disagrees so vehemently. There is, of course, a first-pass answer in the speech itself: “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother” — uncomfortably close, perhaps, to the reality of Hillary standing by Bill. Yet Obama makes clear that he is not just standing by an old mentor and father-figure, but an entire community: black Americans. “These people are a part of me,” he says of the American black community, a locution that implies both identity and yet also separation – acknowleding that Obama had come to the church as an outsider and made a conscious decision to stay and belong there.

This loyalty to a community that Obama acknowledges is both strong and imperfect invokes another theme related to perfection: reconciliation.

Our current notion of post-conflict reconciliation is largely informed by the work of Bishop Desmond Tutu in healing the wounds of South African apartheid. Today, there is a practice and a process of reconciliation that’s widely studied, refined, and applied across the world. Sen. Obama’s speech reflects two steps in this process: acknowledging of the merits of both sides and suggesting options for redress.

Bishop Tutu’s practice of worldly reconciliation was rooted in Christian belief in a divine one. And for Christians, Obama’s decision to devote himself to the imperfect community of black Americans may just echo another outsider who chose to stand with a broken people. For Christians believe that God sent his only son to become fully human in order to redeem the world; through Jesus, Christians find reconciliation with God.

Critics who perceive Barack Obama as “messianic” may be on to something, for as much as he asks America to join in racial reconciliation, he cannot help but embody that reconciliation in himself. Obama, of course, is not Jesus, and we will not achieve redemption – worldly or otherwise – by believing in him. If Americans are to heal our racial divide, we must commit ourselves to a process and not just a person. And yet this one person may just have the right message for the right time to begin that process. Perhaps for an issue as intractable as race in America, a leap of faith is all that is possible in an imperfect world.

More evidence that the extended primary battle benefits the Democratic party: today our crew registered 41 new Democrats in the state of Pennsylvania. Because the PA primaries are closed (only registered Democrats can vote in the Democratic primary), the Obama campaign has been furiously registering supporters as Democrats, if they are not already identified as such.

Today, we registered voters at a Shop Rite strip mall in SW Philly for most of the day; Upper Darby in the afternoon; and finally the Old City bars at night, where our kelly green “O’Bama” signs won us smiles on this last Saturday before St. Patrick’s. Surprisingly, we also got eight registrations tonight; the last two identified themselves as serving in the military and fervently hoped that Obama would be able to end the war in Iraq.

Pennsylvania has leaned strongly towards Clinton, and even here in urban Philly her supporters are all around. (Many are as unfortunately rude as the ones I encountered doing visibility in Cambridge MA). Wherever she’s deploying her ground troops, they were no where near us. While we kept running into Obama crews, we enountered not a single person or group out for Clinton at any point today.

I spent this past weekend stomping through snowy Vermont, going door-to-door in St. Johnsbury on Saturday and Barre (”Barry”) on Sunday. (Last weekend we’d phonebanked to Chelsea). On arrival in St. Johnsbury, we immediately encountered the most visible sign of Ben & Jerry’s endorsement of Obama: the ObamaMobile, driven by staff intern Erin. Talk about visibility.

Both towns are of roughly similar size and demographic makeup: over 95% white and per capita incomes well under $20,000. In both locations, more than just monster snowbanks threatened to swallow entire homes: For Sale signs dotted the landscape — many, apparently, from foreclosures. No one ever answered the door at those houses.

There’s an interesting mix of trust and protectiveness up in northern Vermont. A significant percentage of homes had large, loud, and frankly scary dogs. At the end of one cul-de-sac, I conducted an entire conversation shouting at a man in a distant window while his two dogs ran interference. I was breaking a fundamental rule of canvassing — watching my personal safety — but in this case it was worthwhile. The whole household supports Obama.

At the same time, many families kept their doors unlocked. Several of us accidentally burst into occupied homes while attempting to insert flyers.

Taped to the window of one door I knocked on was a neatly-written sign that read, “We are happy Catholics. We aren’t interested in changing our religion!” A older lady opened the door and kindly informed that she was, indeed, supporting Obama. Delighted, I asked if her husband was also voting for him. “[John] has Alzheimer’s,” she said in a hushed voice. I expressed my sympathy as someone whose grandfather and grandfather-in-law had also suffered from the disease. Her voice took on a twinge of anger when she said, “He doesn’t even know I’m his wife!” We held hands briefly, and I said goodbye.

On our list, tenement dwellers far outnumbered “latte-sipping, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving” yuppies. And more common than Clinton, McCain, Obama, or Huckabee supporters were non-voters — none of whom seemed apologetic or defensive about it. The Obama campaign has reached out particularly strongly to political dropouts, but many seem untouched.

I walked by this house thinking that the spray paint was marking up some kind of pipeline; my canvassing partner was the one to point out that it is, in fact, a faded swastika. Perhaps some 500 Jews live in the Montpelier-Barre region; I hope that the (former?) residents of this home, which was one of the ones for sale, were not among them.

Signs of financial hardship were everywhere we walked. Many families listed fuel assistance as a top priority. One fellow-canvasser described walking into a home where the entire family sat on the couch, huddling together under blankets with only their faces peering out.

By the demography, Vermont should be Hillary country: among the states it ranks 48th in black residents and 38th in per-capita GSP. And I certainly met my share of both Hillary and McCain supporters, all very polite (except one girl who shouted, from behind her mother, that “Obama is a $#@%!”). There was even one couple supporting Huckabee, here in the least religious state in the Union. But this is also the land of Howard Dean, still regarded with deep affection from many I met, the man whose own Presidential campaign made it possible to oppose the Iraqi war. The war didn’t come up much in my conversations here, but Vermont has been staunchly, if carefully, anti-war for some time — precisely because so many from the state serve in the military.

Vermont is barely on the national radar as the Clinton and Obama campaigns clash over Texas and Ohio, and with polls showing Obama ahead by a large margin in the Green Mountain state, the national eye will likely continue to fall elsewhere tomorrow night. But Vermont is used to being overshadowed, not least of all by its politically connected neighbor and bizarro twin, New Hampshire. In 2004 the state supported Dean well after he’d ended his campaign. The voters I spoke with expressed some quiet satisfaction that this time, at least, their votes would matter.

NPR’s Ina Jaffe reports this morning on how the Obama campaign trains volunteers in grassroots organizing techniques. Particularly noteworthy is the story includes the power of story in the campaign.

At NPR.org
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