Wo-bama

If you haven't seen it already, you should really watch this video, which combines the work of will.i.am of the Black-Eyed Peas, Barack Obama, and Jesse Dylan, son of Bob Dylan. Curious now?

I volunteered today to do phone banking at the Obama headquarters in downtown Chicago. It was kind of fascinating in its own particular way. The first exciting part was that there were hundreds of people there. They ran out of phones before the session even started, they kept running out of scripts and lists of numbers, there weren't even close to enough chairs. So people (including me) were spread out on the floor, making calls on their cell phones, and taking notes off other people's scripts and then improvising. There were a lot of middle-aged women and young people. I didn't see too many middle-aged men, except a lawyer I knew, a partner at a major law firm who'd brought his kids along. Everyone was pretty excited; some people were even giddy.

Making my calls, I talked to a man in New Mexico who said he'd never voted because of his religion; he told me that he's a Jehovah's Witness. I tried to convince him for a while ("Don't you think that God needs helpers?") but I think I failed. Can anyone confirm that Jehovah's Witnesses not voting is an actual thing? He told me he was impressed and inspired by Obama, but that the world had problems even Barack couldn't fix. True, of course. I was momentarily stumped.

I talked to a man in Idaho who didn't understand what the caucuses were and had never participated in one. I explained it all to him very carefully, to the best of my ability (limited, having never participated in a caucus), and he seemed relieved and like "oh! I could do that!" We closed the call with him saying that he planned to go out and caucus for Obama--I was pleased.

For most of the numbers I called, I was either hung up on, or left a message on the machine; I think I talked to about 15 people out of 60 or so calls I made. But one thing I did notice was that almost none of the women I spoke to wanted to tell me who they was voting for. Out of the men, there was the Idaho guy who I convinced to go out for Obama, and then a bunch of other guys voting for McCain and Romney, and the Jehovah's Witness guy. But every woman I talked to either claimed to be undecided or explicitly said she wouldn't say who she was voting for, save one woman who said she was supporting Obama. Maybe they're all voting for Clinton and didn't want to tell me, as I introduced myself as an Obama volunteer. I say rock on with their bad selves.

So thinking all day about how these women reacted to being interrogated about their voting plans, I was really disappointed, upon getting home from watching the Superbowl, to read the following line in this NYT article:

But at the Upper West Side gathering, four white, liberal, baby-boomer women defended Mrs. Clinton’s feminist credentials as they sipped red wine and talked politics with a gusto more often reserved for topics like sex, husbands, children and real estate."

I am getting really tired of the "all women are now like the characters from Sex & the City!" meme. Get over it, world. Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda are characters in a television show. Ask any actual woman which character she's like and she'll probably be stumped, because they are not like real people. They are archetypes, and they are interesting archetypes who eventually change and progress, but they do not represent women. Anyway, this is patronizing and sexist. Women actually care about politics?! No!

Women do care. They far outnumbered the male volunteers at the event I was at today, and they were running the show. And this is in Obama's campaign; I can't even imagine what it's like in Clinton's campaign. The women I talked to on the phone all said they were going to go caucus, and they felt that their political preferences were something private and sacred, almost like if I'd asked them whether they were sexually active or smoked marijuana. They weren't flip about it, and they sure as hell didn't want a young whippersnapper like me telling them who to vote for; I respected that.

So it is with that thought that I am pleased to announce to you that people on MSNBC have been taking their talking points from me. Last week sometime, I wrote down the following fragment on a scrap of paper that is currently sitting on my coffee table: "MSNBC, Chuck Todd: The swing vote is going to be the educated white men." Hearing somone acknowledge that men, specifically educated white men, comprise a group that sometimes votes as a bloc, just like women and black people, warms the cockles of my humorless feminist machine-heart. Thanks, Chuck.