Campaign Update

I guess I'll just go in chronological order.

Everything's cool...just a few little goofy things:

*Yesterday I went up to Olinda to meet with Summer's parents. I gave them the 411 on what we need to do the day before and of the Primary election. I had this elaborate plan laid out, with all these procedures and roles for people to play. And they looked at me as if I had 3 heads...again. I was basically met with the following response:

"Dave, in your experience, have you ever seen it when a candidate's friends refuse to help?"

Which basically was their way of telling me that there's no way in hell we can do what I want to. More on that later.

During this meeting, they also inundated me with so many questions about stuff, wanting information about things they had no involvement with, on the inside, I started to get a bit defensive. I don't know if I blogged on this, but Summer hit me with this thing where I'm supposed to run drafts of my weekly e-mail to our list through her mother first. Whatever.

I also found out that while we are working on real campaign stuff, the family is pretty much focusing on sign waving by the side of the road. While I've told them a million times that we need to be knocking on doors, only Summer does it and that's reluctantly...and with a laxative, I'm assuming. So, I'm doing a lot of door-to-dooring (d2d).

*Then I found out that I had the time wrong for an event set up this Thursday...I'm pretty sure I copied & pasted it from an e-mail from Summer, but whatever. So I was up until 2am re-doing flyers - some of which had already gone out.

*So today I did more d2d. Initially it rained off and on. That was fun. Then it just got windy. That was fun too, because your campaign literature doesn't stay where you want it to when the person's not home. Today was also the first day I was worried about dogs. Even one big dog, I'm OK with, but at this one house there were two. They were big, they were not on leashes and they were coming at me. I did all the appropriate things to chill them out short of mace and they didn't keep coming, but my clipboard wasn't going to do shit in this one.

On another note, there was this house where this little foo-foo dog wanted a piece of me. Normally I kind of laugh because I know that if the dog ever got free, it wasn't going to do anything. But this dog was pissed...apparently at me. If it could've gotten free, my ankle was toast. I actually was about to take a picture of it, but the owner came to the door and I had to put the phone away. Not a way to get a vote.

*I wrapped up the Deaf vote for Summer today. That would be because I met the only Deaf person on the whole island. We actually scared the shit out of each other. She surprised me because she was Deaf, then I surprised her because I signed.

*Another woman told me that she's voting for Summer, loves her, but at the Kula Forum, it was bad form to confront Kyle about his campaign donations. You don't do that here. Then she proceeded to contradict herself that she thought that everyone needed to know this stuff and she was glad it was out. She's coming to the meet-n-greet on Thursday to tell Summer. Oh thank god...the campaign is saved. I've already warned Summer.

*A strange, strange thing, that even Summer didn't have a good explanation for. OK...Summer is running in a Primary. When she wins that, she has to run against a Republican. I've seen lawns where there are lawn signs for both the Democratic primary opponent and the Republican opponent. I...uh...wha?

*So after thinking about it...I've scaled down are Get Out The Vote effort to finding 12 people who would be willing to phone bank. I'll be stunned if we have 5 (Me, Summer, one of her parents and two others). I know as you get to the end of campaigns, nerves get frazzled. But Dude, I'm so over this. I just want it to end.