At the Dean campaign, Gina C. Schwartz ’06, co-chair of Harvard Students For Dean, shouts into the receiver as her fellow Deaniacs call voters in the background. The elderly woman on the other line is hard of hearing.
As Schwartz’s voice rings through the house, David C. Marshall ’07 forces himself out of his comfortable position and walks downstairs; he can’t hear a word through the racket. Elizabeth S. Thrall ’05 sits quietly at a desk, a cell phone cradled in her ear; Russell M. Anello ’04 is upstairs making his calls.
The Dean campaign office has moved two blocks south and two blocks west of its usual center of operations. These Dems, spending their off-peak weekend mobile minutes on phonebanking, can bring the cause with them wherever they go.
A chorus of campaign spiels and “yes, ma’am, thank you ma’am”s fills the room. A Southern accent has started to creep into the volunteers’ voices.
Schwartz, a native of upstate New York, is suddenly blessed with a trace of South Carolinian drawl; Elizabeth has added a dash of Texan to her light New Joisey inflection.
Shades of Frustration
The Dean campaign here is full of passionate but inexperienced staffers and volunteers. There is a certain energy and verve that is missing from the mechanical quality of the Edwards operation. But at the same time, this energy is unfocused. Things are disorganized. Harvard volunteers grow impatient at being given overlapping canvassing routes and, worse, duplicate phonebanking numbers.
At the Kerry camp, Harvard volunteers voice their frustration over the campaign staff’s incompetence, and begin to take their own initiative.
“It’s just frustrating that we spend so much time in the car,” Lesser complains after he and other Harvard volunteers spend nearly an hour trying to locate the right canvassing neighborhood.
When the Kerry workers wind up in a wealthy, upper-class neighborhood, Jonathan D. Einkauf ’06 worries that their efforts will be squandered in a “likely” Republican area. To prove his point, Einkauf accosts a man in his driveway, asking whether anyone in the neighborhood would ever vote liberal.
“He gave me a look like I was smoking something,” Einkauf says.
Disappointed by the disorder of the campaign office, Einkauf, Lesser and Joseph M. Hanzich ’06 take it upon themselves to leave literature at black churches and grocery stores along their assigned routes.
Lesser explains that given the hectic circumstances, sometimes the volunteers on the ground have to take things into their own hands.
“A lot of the [campaign] strategies are written from Washington, D.C., or we were getting our orders from Columbia,” Lesser says. “But once you put feet in the street you realize that certain things that they’re asking you to do might not be effective. Once you’re out there, people are responding to different things.”
—Staff writer Michael M. Grynbaum can be reached at grynbaum@fas.harvard.edu.