'Round the Bend

Today I was invited to attend a brief pep talk at the Donnelly HQ in South Bend. I have to say, it was a truly eye-opening experience. I walked through a narrow corridor filled with campaign detritus into a small room with a large table and phones interspersed throughout the room, where a handful of people were talking to prospective voters, their voices alternating between the droll tone of reading talking points and the hopeful excitement of people telling others about a leader they really like and bunch of other leaders they really hate.

In fact, it was the people that was the eye-opening part. All told, there were maybe 25 of us. Twenty-five of us, standing between congress and one of the richest, most well-connected men in Northern Indiana. And most of us were not even part of the true hard core of the Donnelly campaign, the folks who've been in there every week for the last God-knows-how-long pounding away at the phone lists and the pavement.

Nor were they the kind of people you'd picture as movers and shakers and congressional kingmakers. There were a couple of older women, some kids who looked fresh out of high school, a businesswoman. One woman there commented about people she knows in her neighborhood who are so poor that they can't afford the $9 it takes to get a driver's license. One such person is crashing at her house as we speak, in fact!

They were the people you see in the checkout line at Martin's (and not one of those fancy ones with the huge organic section or the faux-open market area by the produce). The people standing in front of you at the BMV.

And then Joe came in, fresh from canvassing and chatting with a reporter from the New York Times. The first thing that strikes you about Joe is how much he doesn't look like a politician. He has a big, easy smile, but his pale Great-Lakes complexion, big, masculine brow and jawbone, and hair sticking up slightly in the back and on one side is a far cry from the super-tanned, gleaming and perfect-haired pro golfer with the boyish face, Chris Chocola (the second thing that strikes you is how much weight Joe has lost since they shot his earliest campaign photos; this guy is really putting in the effort!). Nor does he share the hyper-confidence, even arrogance, apparent in many statewide elected officials; Joe is a humble kind of guy, and you can tell that about him immediately (I also happen to know people who have known Joe for a long time who say the same thing).

Then he opens his mouth, and you find that Joe Donnelly doesn't really sound much like a politician, either. The momentary pauses, the intonation of his voice, the occasional repetitiveness make it crystal clear that the guy speaking to you really believes what he's saying, and believes it matters, but the words come out like someone a lot more accustomed to conversations than speeches.

Needless to say, it's a real breath of fresh air, and it's easy to see why he's won so many people over in this district.

What Joe said during the talk was pretty mundane: he talked about how much he appreciates our help, about how important volunteers are to the campaign, about how this campaign's as much about us and about him, even if it's his name on the ballot. He talked about the vaunted Republican GOTV machine, literally and figuratively-- he poked a little fun at the super-duper high-tech GOP voter machine that runs the world while calculating exactly who their target voters are. His emotions flared a little bit as he talked about how this race is the key to a Democratic House, about how if we're gonna take our country back, this is exactly the kind of race the donkeys have to win. When Joe says "take our country back," and asks you to visualize it, you can see the emotion in his eyes.

And when he says, "if we wanna change things in Iraq," you can see a tiniest glimmer of anger.

After laughing a bit about how his campaign managers have to keep him abreast of how the campaign's doing every morning (because he's spending every waking moment canvassing, phone-banking, and doing every other demeaning election chore there is), he said goodbye to go talk to a reporter from CNN. As someone else began talking, Joe hesitated for a second, like he wanted to come say hi to the people in the room individually, but thought better of it after he remembered his schedule. The rest of us all got to chatting a little and enjoying the pizza the campaign had provided. I met a woman who lurks on most of my favorite blogs, both state and national, and a progressive who's committed to Joe despite minor objections to the fact that he's a pro-life Democrat. There were some union folks in the back of the room, and people of all races mingling in the small, slightly dingy room.

The longer I talked to all these amazing, and amazingly normal people, the more comfortable I was with the fact that they're the ones charged with defeating the Chocola juggernaut. The Count can keep his super-duper high-tech voter machines, his horde of paid DC shills and staffers, his piles of oil money and his corporate connections.

We the People will be heard.