This one was joyful and absurd.
So, remember the Obamamercial? The Obama campaign raised a lot of money. Do you know how much? Bush raised $250 million in 2004, but Kerry actually stormed past him and was up around $300. Obama spent $200 million on the primary. He spent about three-quarters of a billion dollars total. Not joking. For what it's worth, they gave us a month's pay as a bonus, and I'm typing on the laptop that they gave me to do my job. Anyway, it was revealed a month or so before the election that Obama had bought 45 consecutive minutes of ad space on all the major networks five days before the election. I was excited. My buddy Evan was nervous, he thought it would backfire.
On the night of the Obamamercial I was doing what I did nearly every night: making 3-5 hours of calls. I was also, at this stage of things, really really tired. The pressure to get through these calls was immense. It was kind of the lifeblood of the job, and a nightly slog, so calltime was sacred and there was no arguing with that. On this night the fatigue caught up to me. I was failing. I would take an inordinate amount of time to move from one call to the next, and I found myself doing the extremely-tired-stare from time to time. When the Obamamercial came on, I put it on in the background, but after a few calls I gave in. I was going to sit and watch the guy who I was doing all this stuff for.
My friend Lois, bald, talked more like a New Yorker than a Southener and cool as school, walked in. She flopped down in a chair and we commiserated on fatigue. The election was making everyone fatigued, but we were doing the legwork. The 45 minute piece was well-reviewed, did well in the polls and was therapeutic for me. Don't worry, Obama's got it all under control.
Midway through, Lois turns to me and says, "Hey who's that with the Obama truck? Have you talked to THEM about volunteering?"
???
I look out the big front window to see "the Obama bus" spray-painted playfully across the side of a van. It was pulling up in front of my office on an otherwise deserted night in late October. Two guys and a girl, all college-age and wearing funny homemade shirts hop out. They came into the office, gave us hugs and handed us t-shirts.
Their story as best I can remember it: They were from California. They had been deeply inspired by Barack Obama. Inspired to get in a van and drive through every swing state, spreading Obama love and good cheer. They had a blog with a map of all the places they'd been and the places they would be, and it showed a jagged line going across, then up, then down, then east again across the country. For reasons I don't know, they were driving through my dusty little county. They were not looking for me. They did not know that there was an Obama office in this town. They stumbled on me by providence.
We chatted for a while. They sharing their story, we sharing ours, both of us marveling that our paths happened to cross. Come to think of it, they might have been the only people not worn down by the campaign at that point. They were still full of magic. They gave me a much needed push toward the finish, got back in their van and went their merry way.
Here's the shirt they gave me, modeled by a certain someone who I gave it to after the election:
Pretty sweet huh? I was wearing it the next day when I heard the guy in the diner say, "I don't think Obama's a terrorist, but I think he's maybe a little more of a terrorist than John McCain."This concludes the "Good Strange Things" series. Bizong.
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