Acting Locally
September 24th, 2007 | by Jet Netwal |Last night I had the opportunity to hang out with folks who think like me. The difference was, this was face time. All my politicking is cyber. I write, comment and chat all the time, but I rarely actually talk to people. Part of that is because I live in a red county, and my mother raised me not to pick fights with strangers. A larger part is that I hadn’t bothered to seek them out. My bad.
The first myth busted, for me anyway, is that people involved in local politics are plugged in, smarter and far too savvy to hang with a newbie like me. Nope. Everybody I talked to was a lot like me, knows some stuff about the local and national scene, but wants to learn more. They ask questions, and listen. It was an information exchange, not a snob fest of know-it-alls . It was a lot of fun.
I attended to help out my candidate for District 8, Alan Grayson. He was mentioned in a recent Rolling Stone article (the one with Maroon 5 on the cover) four times. I put a Rolling Stone on every chair in the dining room, then I hung by the door and handed out flyers, which turned out to be pretty fun. I got into several nice conversation s. I met the new juvenile prosecutor for my county, several folks who’d lived in my country all their lives (considering how red it is, that’s pretty cool) and a fired up member of team Obama.
Our table had two candidates for the FL District 8 seat, an organizer for Gravel, three regular folks and me. I’m rarely regular, but I behaved myself. I made one glass of wine last 3 hours. (Can somebody pick Tom Baker off the floor, please? Smartass.) We had a good group, and the conversation was stimulating. I felt I held my own, and brought up some insights from my recent posts that had my table nodding along.
Edwards was the candidate most liked, although I give the Gravel guy props, he worked our table like the election was hinged on our conversion. The Hillary can’t lose meme was in full force, and the Gravel guy and I both made inroads on dispelling that. The consensus was that Edwards would get the veep nod again. Eh, maybe. Depends who wins the nomination. Not everybody needs him.
The Obama folks were out in force, and had bought a whole table. They are really nice, and boy, are they fired up for their candidate. That’s kind of a deal for me. The Hillary people are nice, professional , but they come off like they’re there to do a job. The Obama people are inspired. They make you want to climb right up on the wagon of idealism and ride, baby. Thundercats Ho! There’s definitely a hunger for doing the right thing for the country, and the Obama campaign is tapping that.
Four candidates from District 8 attended, and each got to speak. It was cool how many people came up to my candidate to share how happy they were he’s running again. The inner circle, so to speak, was rallied. All to the good. I plan to continue helping Grayson, and I think getting more involved in my local political scene is in the cards too. My red county is growing purple, and that’s a good thing.
Tags: BIO, Alan-Grayson , Barack, Candidates, Congress, Democrats, Edwards, iraq, local, Obama, Political, Politics
