... that don't really fit into any category. That, and I have a ton of stuff to do this week, so this is my "cut-corner" post.
The signs above are Burma Shave signs. The background is here, but in short there used to be a shaving cream company called Burma Shave who would put up a row signs in the road that would spell out a slogan. An example of what it looks like is below.
The campaign plans to put these all over the state, preferably along highways and frequently traveled roads, but in truth it's wherever we can get supporters.
Of course, the trick is someone has to make them. Which is where we come in. Last week, I spent a good portion of it painting the signs (mostly the base - little artistic ability needed) and then drilling holes in the signs. We also had to load a ton (literally - 2,000 pounds) of rebar into trucks which are the poles we use to place the Burma Shave signs. Did I mention how rusty they were?
We spent one of the days walking around the Latino business district in East Des Moines putting up signs and handing out literature to local merchants. I was the grunt labor for this venture because Joan and Juan are the Latino outreach people for the campaign, and they both speak ridiculously good Spanish. The place in the upper right is a dessert place/hair salon (I kid you not) and the place on the lower left is an awesome, awesome Taco truck. The place on the lower right is a wall of fortunes from a Chinese place called Mr. Eggroll. As people know, I am not picky about food, but this place is BAD!
These are some pictures from our press room. Yes, there is pride taken in the number of articles placed by the campaign. The picture on the right is the Senator on the Daily Show. This type of format is his forte, as opposed to debates, because he can finish a thought that doesn't require it being a soundbite. You can see his performance here.
Each star on the map above represents someone who came to work on the Iowa campaign. One of the cool things about this campaign is not only the breadth of people from the states, but also from all over the world. Last count we had a Brit, an Aussie, a Swede, an Italian, a Ghanan, an Ethernopian (see South Park), and a Frenchie. Apparently we are also getting another Brit, a Kiwi, another Aussie, and a Nederlander. Can someone say "places to crash while traveling?"
My friend Greg took these photos while the Senator was visiting the Iowa State Fair with his family. I like the one on the left because the expression is priceless, and I like the one on the right because he is riding on one of those drop towers with his whole family.
Today was the Swede's (okay, his name is Markus) last day, so we took a group photo. I've gotten to know these peeps pretty well, so I feel I now I have my crew. They are, from left to right, Matt (the Spartan in the field), Meredith (the Texan who does press), Rance (the Kansan and Stanford Cardinal who does African-American outreach), Caitlin (New Media), Patrick (Iowa native and Marquette Golden Eagle), the Swede, Noah (St. Louis Cardinal who channels California as he does Faith outreach), Giulia (the Italian who lives in Russia and speaks English like a Brit - advance work - she also is fluent in Italian, French, and Russian), Erica (fellow lawyer who is a Hawkeye and does Rural outreach), Clarissa (Buckeye who does Faith outreach), and my myself.
In honor of Markus's last day, Erica got him a remote control Dale Earnhardt Nascar. Much merriment was had, as it is had everyday on the Obama campaign.
UPDATE: A shout-out to Stephanie Geis. She e-mail yelled at me for making fun of NASCAR, but you will be happy to know that Markus's car is a big hit back in the Sweden and that his cat in particular likes it very much.
... I'm not even kidding. That is what it was called.
The first presidential debate for this cycle in Iowa was held at Drake University here in Des Moines on August 19th. At 8AM. You can find tons of clips of the debate on Youtube, so I won't bother with those here, but the general consensus is that Richardson, Obama, and Biden did particularly well. This one Obama quote, however, is too could to pass up because it addresses his alleged "inexperience" very directly.
One of the things all the campaigns do before the debate is called visibility (or sign war) - in other words, a big contest to see who can bring more supporters and chant louder for our candidate outside of the debate site. I'll be honest - in national terms it is not a huge deal, but for us and for the other campaigns it kind of is because it is the first time we are all in the same area and go toe-to-to organizationally with them. Because of this, each campaign brings pretty much its whole staff from the entire state to make their group the largest. Some people drove in four hours in the middle of the night after a full day or working (remember, campaign work is mostly done in the evenings and on weekends when people are home). Mad props to them. There are two more events like this: the Harkin Steak Fry and the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner (each state has one of the latter). Those will also be insane.
We met at the office at midnight to go over the "plan." The guy in the Bulldog suit is Quinn (Drake University's mascot), one of the field organizers (and also a Terps fan). He lost 9.5 pounds over the next nine hours, so for those looking to lose weight...
The layout of the visibility site is set forth in the top picture. Basically, there are six spots in two parking lots across from the debate size of approximately equal size. Each campaign who wants one gets one spot (in this case, Hillary, Biden, Obama, Dodd, and Edwards - every major one except Richardson), and then there is one miscellaneous spot. Through a lottery, we got one of the middle two spots. You actually want one of the corners because those are seen best from the road, so our spot was not all that ideal, but we were able to stay within the rules and overcome this deficiency.
Behind all the campaign areas is a general public area. We decided that we wanted a big portion of this general public area not only behind our area, but also behind the Clinton area, for our supporters so as to surround them. The gates for the visibility area opened at 4AM. In order to ensure we got the area we wanted, we left the office at 2:30AM and got to the gates by 3AM. We actually beat the University people who were running the debate, not to mention every other campaign. The dozen or so Biden people looked confused, but amused, while the Hillary people clearly were not happy to see us there. When the gates opened, we flooded into the area and made an arms locked circle around the area we wanted. When no one else even wanted to challenge us for the area, we just hung out. For two hours. Above are some pictures of the post "land grab." Don't we look waaaaaaaaaaay too perky for 4AM? The lower right one is me sitting with some people from Council Bluffs (suburb of Omaha).
During these two hours, we setup signage in our areas. We actually just got these new HOPE signs in the past week and were very excited to use them. One other wrinkle about the sign war was that the campaigns competed to line the streets leading up to the debate with signs for our candidates, in this case 19th and 31st street (the streets from the I-235 to Drake). Of course, since these are people's yards, generally only supporters of a candidate will put these signs in their yard, so it is also a sign of the number of candidate supporters in Des Moines. The one exception was one house which had Richardson, Hillary, and Obama signs, as well as what looked like a big tombstone with Richardson written on it. I don't know how that helped. We drove around earlier and saw that we easily won that battle with Hillary having half-a-dozen signs along those routes, and us having at least a dozen. I know it's a campaign-geeky thing, but you get into it if you have been up for 36 hours straight like I had.
The picture on the right above is the "trailer." You can see the trailer stationed on the very top map as well. You remember how I was saying we were trying to overcome the deficiency of not having a corner spot? Well, this is how we did it. While Hillary had the corner spot, there were no rules on having items in the street, as that was public property. So, we parked a trailer there for a day (legally, as no meters were in effect on Saturday), and then we decorated the trailer when the time came so as to literally take Hillary's corner from her and further surround her campaign. It was awesome and a stroke of genius.
The picture on the right is Noah climbing into a tree (at least 15 feet up) to place a sign. Now THAT is dedication.
As sort of a reaction to us, the Hillary campaign tried to put this giant HILLARY sign up on their corner to counter our trailer advantage. Fortunately (or unfortunately) they didn't follow the debate rules which did not allow freestanding signs of that size, so they had to take it down. Ha-ha. The other picture is the Biden campaign, which was sandwiched in between us and Hillary. We felt kind of bad for them as we completely swamped them. But not too much.
I'm going to give the Dodd campaign some love because they had some interesting characters. On the upper left is the Dodd Rod. Upper right, White Hare/White Hair (I think Dodd has white eyebrows also). Lower left, the Dodd Theropod, and on the lower right, the Dodd Bod.
At 6AM, two hours before the debate, after all the campaigns had set up, the games began. While to this point it had been mostly staff, at this time our hundreds of volunteers showed up, and it was nonstop chanting, singing, yelling, and taunting for two straight hours. It was awesome. We went head-to-head with the Hillary campaign a couple of times, but completely overwhelmed them because, as stated above, we had outflanked them from both sides between our spot and our trailer. Our favorite was when one side would chant "O" and the other side would chant "Bama!"
At around 6:30AM, as if we needed more noise, the Isiserettes showed up. They are big supporters of the Senator and are usually a drum-line/dance team, but since there were noise restrictions (this is 6AM in a residential neighborhood after all) they had to leave their drums at home. Instead, they danced to the beat of our chants. Boo yeah.
Above on the lower left is Fred on the scooter that debuted at the Iowa State Fair Parade. Fred is a sophomore at NYU at the Wagner School (same program as Michelle). He originally interned in Chicago for Obama, but wanted to get out in the field so came out to Ames. We actually met and spent a day in Mason City doing work for the Wing Ding event at the Surf. In any case, it was good to see him.
As you can see, I also got into the scooter action. Fuuuuuuuuun. This went on for a full two hours. The cheering from each section was always the loudest when the candidates came by. I only saw Edwards and Obama. The Edwards bus actually stopped for a bit to wave to their supporters. Obama slowed down and waved, but I am guessing the Secret Service didn't want to stop for too long. The rest of the time, there was no question we were having the best time. The Hillary people were the second loudest even though they were smaller than the Edwards crowd, as the Edwards crowd kept looking over to us like we were crazy.
To say we dominated turnout is a serious, serious understatement. I guess you would expect I would say that, but above I give you objective evidence. As shown from the first picture, we had a 30 foot by 34 foot area marked out for each of the campaigns with red tape. We can use that as a rough gauge of how many supporters were in each area. The Biden campaign's area is in the lower right. As you can see, they barely had any people beyond their first layer (maybe 50?). On the lower left is the Hillary campaign. They take up more space, but many of them are stand alone signs, and even with that they take up only about half the area (maybe 100). On the right is the Edwards campaign. They filled up about 3/4 of the space (150-200). On the upper right is our campaign at its peak. As you can see, we are completely spilling out of our area. We had at least 300 people, and it may have been up to about 350. Holla!
After the visibility/sign war, we all went back to Planet Sub (good subs, no surprise!) to watch the debate. As you can see, we also caused a good sized traffic jam. After the debate, Obama also showed up to work the crowd, and also to thank his Iowa staff and volunteers. The video I shot of that is, of course, in the previous post. The photo on the right is Paul Tewes (Obama's Iowa State Director - in other words the top dog in Iowa), David Axelrod (the guy with the moustache is Obama's top media advisor), and David Plouffe (looking away - Obama's campaign manager - the REAL top dog). I know it's very insider baseball, but in the campaign world these guys are as much of a celebrity as Obama himself, so it was great to have them address the crowd.
And last, but not least, we have Senator Barack Obama with pretty much his entire Iowa team. What a motley crew (especially since we had been awake since at least midnight at this point - it was almost noon). On to victory in 2008! (Also, props in the blog if you can find where I am in the photo).
