I went canvassing in Iowa this Saturday, and although I’m encouraged by the results, it was a hellish time.

I’m hesitant to report a negative canvassing experience because I already know that there’s a lot of irrational fear about it. But hey, if you want to hear about a smooth and positive canvassing experience, you can check out Dan’s account of his trip. What I’m going to describe here is pretty close to a worst case scenario.

Before I do that, though, let me sum up the results. Our team hit about fifty houses (well, that we could account for), partly because of the rain delaying our arrival. In those houses, which were thought by the campaign to contain undecideds and sproadic Democratic voters (SVDs), there were six (I think) people that were definitely going to vote for Obama, four that were for McCain, several that were undecided, and even more several that weren’t home.

That’s far from being statistically significant. Nonetheless, it was encouraging to see in a neighborhood with so many McCain signs. And I needed to be encouraged. That McCain’s outright lying seems to have made this a close election disgusts me.

So, here’s the cast:

Bill: He graciously drove us in the worst driving weather I’ve seen in a long time. I was planning to drive, but the turnout was large enough (around 70 people, according to the thank you email they sent) that the organizers said that they had enough drivers, to my relief.

He’s an active member of AFSCME (he’s a municipal worker), a (liberal) Catholic, and a widower. He’s probably in his sixties and is incredibly well-read when it comes to history, politics, religion, and probably other stuff, too.

Mary Jane: A single mother with kids in college, she immigrated to the US in the ’80s from Canada. Like Sarah Palin, she grew up playing hockey and has a quaint accent. Unlike Sarah Palin, she’s a secular Jew. One of her kids was pretty sickly while growing up, so she had to deal with a lot of healthcare system bullshit. She almost had to move her kids to Canada when her daughter contracted a life-threatening illness that she couldn’t pay the treatment costs for. Fortunately, a friend knew a charitable doctor who was willing to do the work for free.

Me: You know. 31-year-old elitist, currently unemployed by choice. Asian, no kids, no wife. Enjoys board games, metal, Apple products, reading about Pokémon, martial arts, and shrimp. Does not enjoy working or lattes. Is OK with but not crazy about arugula.

Senor Cardgage: Well, that’s who this tale is all about.

Senor Cardgage was tall and rather lanky and wore a trench coat. He also had a large adhesive bandage on his forehead. I’m not great at telling people in their sixties and seventies apart, I’d guess he was in his seventies. Later, he said that he was as old as John McCain, but I’m not sure how seriously to take that. I feel that way about quite a few of the things he said.

Like the real Senor Cardgage, he seemed a bit out of it, but that didn’t stop him from talking. I think one of the first things he said to us after we got in the car was that he was ready to go because he had a good breakfast, thanks to Ensure. I was like, “Oh, great.”

I put my seat belt on and watched him struggle with his for a while. (He and I were sitting in the back seat.) I tried explaining to him the whereabouts of the clip into which his seat belt should be inserted. It wasn’t helping, though, and he was getting exasperated. So, I buckled his seat belt for him. Which I felt weird about.

Senor Cardgage approval rating: 60%

After he got buckled in, he offered everyone in the car an Ensure. Everyone declined. Senor Cardgage was disappointed and said something about it having all the nutrients and stuff a bottle of Ensure back into his bag, which I think contained either a six- or twelve-pack of Ensure. I’m not sure which, but I know he drank a lot of that stuff. Next, he offered everyone a copy of either the New York Times or the Chicago Reader. I took a copy of the Times.

All four of us conversed as a group about what you’d expect us to converse about: Obama, the increasing ridiculousness of the McCain campaign, and the crazy weather. It had been raining all day, and we were passing kids walking waist-deep in water in Niles and rivers that had flooded enough to make trees look like bridges.

Eventually, the group conversation broke up into front seat and back seat conversations. Being in the back seat, my conversation partner was Senor Cardgage, and man, did that guy like to talk. I learned some impressive things about the man. He was canvassing every weekend for two months in 2004. He showed up at a lot of peace rallies around the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Also, he said up front, he had bought a new alarm clock from Walgreen’s the day before. It worked great, but he wasn’t able to sleep that well last night.

It turned out that the bandage on his head was there because he had gotten into a fight over Obama. He was in an argument with a man on the street that was half his age about Obama and McCain, and the younger man actually punched Senor Cardgage. Senor Cardgage tried to duck but wasn’t quite fast enough, and then he kicked his attack “right where it counts.” He left the guy groaning on the sidewalk.

Senor Cardgage approval rating: 80%

What a tough old man! What a despicable asshole he had run into! I kind of hoped that I’d be like him when I was seventy. At the least, I wanted to subscribe to his newsletter.

I learned more about the life of this extraordinary old fellow, who I previously saw as possibly senile. He had a girlfriend! And not only did he have a girlfriend, she, like his McCain supporting attacker, was half his age, in her mid-thirties. She was, as he called her, a “jill of all trades” that was good at everything. She knew how to install a web site! Did I know how to install a web site, he asked? She played in a rock-and-roll band! They were pressing CDs right now! Senor Cardgage had enough charisma and spunk to make a relatively young, well-rounded young lady overlook his nursing home looks and lack of fine motor skills. Dag, yo.

Senor Cardgage’s life wasn’t all hot young rock-and-roll chicks and beating up McCain goons, however. Since the sixties, he had worked for the National Labor Relations Board. He found it to be a very satisfying career. He had also raised a family and was now a widower. In the nineties, his mother had gotten ill, and as the only son, he had to quit his job at the NLRB and take care of her. When she died, he had to sell her house and car.

Since then, he’s been retired but works odd jobs to supplement his income. He mentioned jobs like ushering at a church and selling hot dogs. Nonetheless, he was about to donate $600 to the Obama campaign last month and had donated $1,000 previously.

Also, he had bought a new alarm clock from Walgreen’s the day before. It worked great! However, he wasn’t able to very sleep well last night.

Senor Cardgage approval rating: 90%

As impressed as I was, I was getting tired of listening to Senor Cardgage at that point. In the front, I think Mary Jane was talking about discovering that her grandfather was a bigamist after his death. I wanted to hear that, but Senor Cardgage was coming around to the subject of travel.

It was a shame, he said, that the dollar was so weak. Europe used to be super cheap for Americans to visit. He remembered fondly how far his dollar got him when he visited Europe in the seventies. He was excited to go there because he had heard that European women knew how to treat a man, as opposed to American women who were spoiled and were after your money.

In Germany, he visited historical sites, including the concentration camp at Dachau. The Germans are an industrious, great-beer-making people, he opined, but that chapter of history will always tarnish them. I agreed.

They also had good hookers, he continued. I think I said something like, “Ah. I see.”

He informed me that prostitutes in Germany were pretty cheap and that the people were OK with them. It was no big deal. Senor Cardgage was also a big fan of Scandinavia. You’d think the best hookers would be in Sweden, wouldn’t you? Nope! Senor Cardgage cleared this misconception up for me. The #1 prostitutes in Scandinavia are in Norway! Yeah, in Norway, you go to the prostitute allocation center, and like it probably is in Soviet Russia, the prostitutes choose you! So, he had some pretty good sex with some Norwegian prostitutes. Denmark wasn’t bad, however. They had some sex show that got him so worked up that he scared the ladies.

At this point, I mentioned that I had visited Iceland and that it had some pretty bizarre and amazing landscape. Senor Cardgage nodded and asked what I thought of the ladies there. In actuality, I found the women in Iceland to be fairly attractive, but in an effort to escape from Senor-Cardgage-talking-about-sex territory, I said that they were pretty average. The effort failed.

Senor Cardgage had also crossed Checkpoint Charlie into East Germany back when the Berlin Wall was still up. There, he met some Eastern Bloc chick that didn’t speak English. He expounded at length that there weren’t many places where a Westerner could have privacy. However, he still prevailed and had sex with that chick right underneath the Berlin Wall! Senor Cardgage had launched an American payload deep within enemy territory. Take that, Stalin!

Would I like an Ensure? Was I sure I didn’t? Because it has nutrients! OK, fine, suit yourself.

Senor Cardgage approval rating: 50%

Somehow, Senor Cardgage fell asleep, and we got to Davenport. We got our assignments (lists of probably undecided voters and their addresses), maps, and materials from the local Obama HQ and drove a few more minutes to a neighborhood in Bettendorf. So, how were we going to cover the neighborhood? I suggested that we divide the route into four and each take a part. The group favored working in pairs more, so we went with that. Somehow, I ended up suggesting that Bill and Mary Jane form a pair, leaving me and Senor Cardgage. They dropped us off, and we hit our first street.

We had one map between us, Senor Cardgage and I. Reasoning that I had the better ability to deduce house locations from addresses, I let Senor Cardgage hold the map, along with the lists of addresses we decided that he would hit. Right away, it resumed pouring, and Senor Cardgage was having trouble reading the lists. We were soaked down to our socks and the lists and materials were getting wet. Fucking awesome. I suggested to Senor Cardgage that we try to shelter our papers as best we can, then pointed him to the first house.

He asked me if he should take off the “Fuck McCain” pin he was wearing. I said yes. I took the opportunity to point out the dollop of dribble in the corner of his mouth. (Possibly, it was Ensure.) It had been there for about four hours, but no one wanted to tell him. I figured it’s probably important to represent Obama with a clean mouth, free of globs in the corners.

After hitting my first five houses, I checked back on Senor Cardgage. I had to go way back down the street to do so. Why was he still all the way down here? Was he using the house list?

No, he wasn’t. His list of houses to hit, and a lot of the campaign literature, were a pile of wet shreds. Unreadable. Senor Cardgage, you fuck! We needed that shit! I did some inward sighing and tried to be all “Oh, that’s totally OK” about it.

Senor Cardgage approval rating: 30%

Thus, instead of hitting the assigned houses, he was improvising and hitting every single house on the block. What would the Obama campaign think of him hitting every single house after they deliberately researched specific houses to target? Well, on the other hand, what else could he do?

A. He could skip the houses that were on his list, and I could give him another list. What are the chances that he’ll destroy that sheet? Pretty goddamned high, I had to estimate.

B. We could stay together and double team each house. Of course, that would mean we’d cover roughly half as much territory. I was wet and miserable, and I really didn’t want to suffer in vain. Frankly, I also needed a break from Senor Cardgage and was afraid to watch him in action.

C. He could just hit every house and just bother a few more people than the campaign had planned.

Well, you know how this goes. I chose C, for reasons both pragmatic and selfish.

After I finished the houses on my side of the street, I had to move on to other streets. Once again, I could leave him to continue to carpet bomb the current street, or I could take him with me. And once again, I chose to move on without him.

This time, I hesitated, though. Senor Cardgage was the only one on the team that didn’t have a cellphone. He was also the only one on the team that told me over and over again that cell phones cause brain cancer. So, I tried to really drive home that he should stay on this street until I come back to pick him up. No, I said, you shouldn’t go around the block. You should stay on this street. I felt bad about talking to an old man with undertones usually applied to conversations with children. Then again, I figured, when I’m dying of brain cancer, he’ll have the last laugh. It all evens out.

The first time I checked back with him after moving a street over, he was still on the original street. Looked like he was going to get to the end of the street, though. Here’s where I suggested that he wait on that street for a while if he finished, but if I didn’t show up after a while, to come over to next street over.

When I had finished, and the others had picked me up in the car, we drove back down the street to pick him up. He wasn’t there.

We slowly cruised down the original street. No Senor Cardgage.

Now we were worried. Bill pointed out, not accusingly, though, that he should have never been left alone. He was right. What if Senor Cardgage had a stroke and was twitching in some ditch right now? What if he had tripped on something and was twitching in some ditch right now?

We drove the entire subdivision, scanning for Senor Cardgage’s lanky, betrenchcoated figure. We couldn’t find him. Maybe he had traveled to another subdivision. Maybe he was inside someone’s house at the moment we drove by him. Whatever the case, I had gotten an old man lost in a strange land, partly because I had been annoyed by him.

Fortunately, we got a call from the local Obama office while we were scanning the subdivision. Senor Cardgage was there. Senor Cardgage had been waiting for me on a street corner for thirty minutes, and someone saw him looking forlorn and lost. She, an Obama supporter, it turns out, picked him up and drove him to the office.

Senor Cardgage told me that she was a looker, and that if he had been younger, they probably would have gotten together. Maybe she was under 35. I apologized, did the canvassing tally (excluding Senor Cardgage’s results: “I can’t quite make out this note, but I think this guy named Bob really liked Obama!”), and we left Iowa. All four of us.

On the long, soggy drive home, Senor Cardgage:

- Fought the seat belts really hard and got one of the belts stuck in the hole that it comes out of. We gave up on his seat belt this time.

- Offered us some Ensure. Our declinations mystified him once again.

- Expressed his concerns about hockey moms like 50 times.

- Picked hard at Bill’s faith. He did this right after telling me that he believed that sitting before the Buddha and saying certain words balances his karma. However! The words that some other Buddhist sect chants don’t work at all. They are not special like his sect’s special words. Bill took it all with good humor.

- Tried to convince me to go to Unitarian Church. Several times. “They’re very liberal!” Great.

- Told me he had a great new alarm clock from Walgreen’s. Unfortunately, it did not help him sleep well last night.

Senor Cardgage approval rating: 60%

You know, he’s a good guy. He’s just really old, can’t stop talking, and can’t tell if someone doesn’t want to hear what he’s talking about. Which is all the better for him because he loves talking to strangers about himself having sex!

Tags: old people, weird

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 6:53 am and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.