Vanessa Kerry and A Deer With A Gigantic Rack
I hustled through dinner tonight to get to three hours worth of phone bank operation in support of the Kerry campaign. My task was to phone people who had previously volunteered for the campaign and inform them about a special convention for volunteers this weekend in St. Paul. The featured speakers were Congresswoman Betty McCollum and Vanessa Kerry, who is one of John Kerry's daughters. I don't know if she's the one who looks like Celine Dion or not.
I was curious what the reaction would be to Vanessa Kerry. Would people ask me which daughter it was? Would they simply be silent, leaving me to guess at whether the expression on their face was one of absent puzzlement or hostility? I was genuinely curious how people would react, since it's hard for me to tell exactly where the Kerry daughters would fit in the milieu of Presidential daughters. You have to admit, we've been blessed in the last 12 years with some outstanding and entertaining Presidential daughters. I liked Chelsea Clinton, and I must say the Bush twins have grown on me, especially the brunette. (Barbara? Jenna?) The Gore daughters never made it, of course, and now we can only wonder what their legacy might have been.
You can't help but be a celebrity when you're a First Daughter or Son, but especially so if you're young and in any way interesting or attractive. The media follows you everywhere, which in and of itself has a tendency to make people behave like celebrities. I was clearly too excited to eat at the place in Austin where the Bush girls got busted for underage drinking, but I couldn't help it. That was history, man. And the queso was great there, too...
As it turns out, most people had no reaction to Vanessa Kerry (or anything else I said). Maybe only 20% of the people had any reaction at all, and that reaction was always the same. They would just sort of go, "Hmmm." But it wasn't quite that. They'd cut it short, almost breathe it more than say it. If I hadn't been listening for it so closely, I probably wouldn't have noticed most of them at all. But that's what you would hear, people just go "Hmm." And then not a single mention of Vanessa Kerry again. They never asked, I never offered.
The only exception was what sounded like a teenage girl, maybe 16 to 18. At the mention of Vanessa Kerry, she let out this hurt but interested little, "Oh." The way she said it was like Vanessa Kerry was her friend, and she just found out that Vanessa Kerry had dissed something she was supposed to do with this girl just so she could go to this convention. She sounded betrayed. I was like "So...do you think you'd like to go?" But then she was all like "Oh, my...YES!" Suddenly it was like she had a deep, burning desire to see Vanessa Kerry. She was very dramatic, and I almost wish I'd made up a faux Vanessa Kerry phone survey right on the spot.
Based on the calls I made to voters in my district tonight, out of 23 total live people to whom I mentioned the name "Vanessa Kerry", 4.3% seem to have a deeply personal, perhaps even romantic connection with her. This despite the fact that 100% of the people I talked to most likely weren't sure which one of the Kerry daughters Vanessa is.
Overall, the phone canvassing was a good experience. The Kerry campaign's organization leaves much to be desired here in Minnesota, based on my own experiences and a growing list of anecdotal evidence from people I don't know from Adam, but who have bad stories to tell nonetheless. There are many problems, it seems. No yard signs yet, multiple calling lists that overlap, people complaining about signing up for volunteer opportunities and never getting a call back, and on and on. It makes me wonder how much coordination there is between organizations like the DNC, the state parties, the campain itself, and now newcomers like MoveOn as well. That's a lot of talent spread around, and I figure ultimately you end up with people who can never see what the rest of the machine is doing at any given time.
Here are some numbers. I went through three sheets out of a 200 page printed Excel list. There were 37 names per page, for a total of 7400 names, which in theory represents the people in our Congressional district who have already volunteered for the campaign. This was certainly true for many of the people, though many people had simply signed up for something at some point, and they found their way into a database.
A database which leaves much to be desired in terms of accuracy, that is. Of course much of that is inevitable; people have to transcribe handwriting good and bad and worse from registration lists, and there are always errors in that process. The problem is, I had multiple opportunities to correct the data on the list by virtue of talking to these people on the phone, but there doesn't seem to be any feedback loop to a master list, so the problems are perpetuated.
Out of 111 total names, I was able to get a connection only 40 times. Many of the numbers no longer exist, or are connected to the wrong names, you name it. My sample of three sheets is obviously too small to extrapolate much from, but connecting on only 40 calls in three sheets brings our list of potential callees down from 7400 to around 2700. Now, that might be a good, bad or average total, I really don't know. My point isn't to say these numbers are high or low, just that the master list that we start from is different than what is actually out there for them to access using that list. I found myself wondering if the Republicans or other Dem campaigns do it better or worse than what I was seeing. I'd probably know the answer to that if I worked on more campaigns. It seems like there should be one central list, but that might just be naive.
When I got home, it was already dark. I turned the car off and sat in my driveway to listen to the end of the Twins game, since there were only three outs to go and J.D. Durbin was making his major league debut for the Twins. As I was walking up my front steps after the game was over, I heard a scraping sound in the street behind me. I turned and saw what looked to me to be an enormous deer sprinting down the opposite side of my street, towards the highway offramp that is at the end of our block.
I'm embarrassed to say that my reaction to seeing a deer 40 feet away from me and running even farther way with every step was to yelp loudly and bolt through my front door. This deprived me of a much better look at the deer and also made me feel like an idiot, but this couldn't be helped. I'm telling you, when you are in the middle of the city and you hear a loud galloping noise right behind you that you've never heard before, you're on high alert when you turn around to see what's there. Actually seeing a horse-sized mammal with horns in close proximity pretty much sent me through the door.
After I burst in and told Jane and Linus about the deer, I regained my sense of adventure and went back outside to look for the deer down the offramp. As I did, the girlfriend of our neighbor Margie's son pulled up to Margie's house. She saw me in the middle of the street, and I told her about the deer.
She couldn't believe it, either. "Oh, my god!", she said, looking around. I started to tell her about the deer, where it ran from, how big and fast it was, and what a gigantic rack it had. As the word "rack" was coming out of my mouth, I stumbled ever so slightly over my realization that I was saying the words "gigantic rack" to a woman who most likely has heard the expression a few times before in a different context.
I'm positive she didn't notice, but I was embarassed and ended up saying something like "Yes, it was a big deer. Goodnight, then."
And that pretty well describes my night up till making the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I'm about to eat.
10:37:13 PM 
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