Super-Tuesday Eve on the Streets of Brooklyn

Super-Tuesday Eve on the Streets of Brooklyn
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Last night, I did something that I haven't done in years: I went out with a crew of political activists. As a journalist, I shy away from campaigning for candidates, so when acquaintances or college friends would invite me out to knock on doors, pass out leaflets, or otherwise accost strangers on the street--not my strong suit--I offer up a solid, nonpartisan excuse: I can't. I'm a journalist.

The call to action has been harder to sit out this primary season, if only because the race is so deeply unavoidable in my neighborhood. In years past, nobody, save for party insiders and political junkies, would have known it was primary day. This year? Forget about it. By early January, stylish Xeroxed stencils of Obama's face beneath the word "vote" began to crop up in shop windows and on scaffolding all along Fulton Street, the primary pedestrian artery running from downtown deep into Bedford-Stuyvesant. It wasn't even from Obama's campaign: It was just some dude putting up posters 'cause he thought it was important. And while friends started getting robo-calls from Charlie Rangel, a Brooklyn congressional rep backing Clinton, Obama literature kept cropping up in my building's entryway.

I've lived in my neighborhood, on the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill, for ten years. This is the first time primary day had gotten so much play. And it's the first time I'd seen any of it coming not from the institutions backing candidates--i.e. unions and the Democratic party--but from my neighbors and random people who didn't seem to have much in the way of a political background.

So when a politically active friend from college told me how a round of drinks had inadvertently morphed into a "mini-Obama rally," I was intrigued. "We were just going to get a drink," she said. A crew of Obama supporters--many of them, incidentally, on staff at city unions who are backing Clinton--had gone into Fort Greene's housing projects to encourage people to vote, and stopped at a bar afterwards. "But people kept asking us about the stickers and signs. We basically worked the bar while we were waiting for our drinks."

I got an email inviting me to check out a Monday night attempt, and I couldn't resist. Robo-calls boosting Hillary were one thing--pretty typical for New York City politics-- but I hadn't seen anyone on the street trying to win a vote for her. But bar patrons seeking Obama literature? I'd keep my mouth shut and I wouldn't campaign. Instead, I'd take my notebook.

I wanted to see drama, a movement unfolding. I wanted, to paraphrase a recent New York magazine article, to fall in love. Like most daydreams, the reality wasn't nearly as exciting as the idea: I got a quiet Monday night, cold and damp, and the bars were mostly empty.

The first bar asked the group to leave, though not before volunteers managed to get in a few conversations about voting for Obama. Most of the patrons said they'd been volunteering for Obama already. And one offered a little friendly advice: "You all need to go out to the Marcy Houses and talk to those guys on the corner who don't know. 'Cause we here in Moe's know what's up. Or go to Frank's. Go somewhere that's not comfortable."

The group heeded his advice--sort of--and split into two, sending three law students and a high school teacher to Frank's, a modest neighborhood bar mostly patronized by middle-aged African Americans. There was no lively mileu to blend into here: The bar was quiet and a line of regulars were nursing drinks at the bar.

One student sat down at the bar next to a patron, and the teacher aimed for a cluster of older men near the television. I listened in as two law students approached a pair of relatively young--for the bar's clientele, at least--black men. Once the men, who later identified themselves to me as F.C. and Stacey Killings, realized that they were being approached by Obama supporters, not, as F.C. initially suspected, "religious people," they relaxed.

"If you asked me [who I was voting for] two months ago, I'd have said Hillary," said F.C., a job developer in Brooklyn. "But now I think Obama'll be an asset...[and] he's willing to communicate, and we definitely need a friendly president after these last eight years." He promised to vote provided he could figure out the location of his poll site. (One of the law students gave him a toll-free number to call to determine it, and recommended that he go before work. "They might keep you late at work," she warned.)

Killings was more poetic. "I look at Obama, and I see myself," he said. "Not to mention I've gone to his website...[and] look[ed] at what he's done and what he stands for, in terms of being inclusive," said Killings, who works in the legal department for the city's transportation agency. "And listen, the man is smart."

It wasn't the mass conversion--or love fest--my friend had suggested I might find, and outside, it was a little less cozy. After leaving Frank's the crew of volunteers, still clutching their Obama signs, asked everyone they saw about their voting plans for Tuesday. A well-dressed, young white woman was coming up the sidewalk.

"Are you voting tomorrow?" called out one of the law students.

"I am--and I just came from Hillary's offices," she replied. "Nice try."

The supporters at the bar, the Clinton backer on the street: It could have been a wash as far as the inspiration goes. But when I got home, I found in my notes the story I'd gotten from Harold Butler, the high school teacher, about why he'd spent his weekend, and then a chilly winter night, accosting strangers on behalf of Barack Obama.

"I kept having the idea in my head that I was too busy to volunteer--I always looked at volunteers as 'them,'" he said. Then he watched Obama's speech in New Hampshire. "It became a thing where I could stop being the person just watching."

Whomever wins the nomination--and both candidates have much to recommend them--it's worth noting that what drew Butler to the Obama campaign is what, at their core, elections are supposed to be all about: A time when you stop being the person just watching.

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