Frampton Comes Alive!

Barack Obama has a campaign that is running smoothly at every level, from the perfect pitch of yesterday’s campaign infomercial to the urgent calm here at street level in the Cincinnati office. It sure does help to be winning.

Outside the Obama office, previously a storefront pharmacy, were several large boxes surrounded by teams of volunteers working at curbside. Inside those boxes were 30,000 thin metal bars, the skeletons of lawn signs soon to be born.

I donned some protective gloves and got to work bundling the bars in manageable packages of ten and twenty apiece, perfecting a method of accurately estimating the count and then evening out the bundle using the bended ends as guides. I then asked a volunteer to do nothing but tape the bundles as quickly as I could produce them. (Thank you Henry Ford!)

My bundle taper was a local man in his fifties who came out to the very first Obama organizing meeting in Cincinnati. This was back in the middle of 2007, well before things started heating up. He had been involved in ballot initiatives and electoral politics for years, and was expecting a few dozen diehards to show up. The crowd swelled to about 600.

After we finished, I headed inside as phone bankers making another round of ballot-chase calls. I was handed a culled list of about 30 voters who had not received their ballots, or who had not ordered them. I called through the list and made appointments with four ladies, all in their eighties, who really needed to get those ballots because they were unable to get themselves to their polling place.

But another lady was too sick to leave the house, and hadn’t yet applied for a ballot, and time is running out. By law, all absentee ballots are mailed to the address on file and must be returned postmarked by election day.

So I called the Board of Elections and got some surprising results. First, my call was answered right away. Second, the woman I spoke to told me to leave a message for Patricia, who was in charge of elderly and nursing home voters. Third, Patricia called me back within the hour and arranged to have a duly authorized poll worker drive out the voter’s home the following day to allow her to vote early.

Patricia called me back later to confirm everything was all arranged, and we chatted about the importance of giving sick and elderly voters extra help to vote. I told her I would serve as the point person for any elderly Hamilton county person who needed a ride. The Obama campaign has a statewide hotline for voters who need rides on election day, but I figured it would be good for the board of elections to have a local point person.

In a time where election officials are routinely attacked (sometimes deservedly) for their handling of an election, I have nothing but praise so far for the Hamilton Board of Elections.

As I left the campaign office for the evening, it was reported to me that earlier in the afternoon we had a visit from Cincinnati transplant Peter Frampton, who was coming by to pick up a few of the recently-assembled yard signs.