California Girl Reports from Pennsylvania

Today is the big day!  But rather than spin or offer analysis from the comfort of my DC rowhouse, I’ll give you all this beautiful piece of writing from California Girl who spent a few days last week in Pennsylvania campaigning for Hillary Clinton.

Alicia –

While campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, I thought of John Edwards. Not his hair, (though beautiful and impossibly fluffy), or his charismatic wife, (though also beautiful and an advocate of my candidate’s health plan); I thought of his “two Americas” speech and how that had rung hollow to me when I’d first heard it, more rhetorical than an actual representation. I live in New York and am from Los Angeles – in both of those cities, it had always seemed to me, there were thousands of Americas, more different than they were alike. The day I spent campaigning for Hillary convinced me that not only was I wrong, (and naive!), Edwards pretty much had it right.

We started the day in a town once known for its iron and steel mills, a town that hasn’t grown much since its heydey; (when the 2000 cenus was taken, the population had increased by 1,665 people in sixty years.) Though the area was not overtly depressed, it was far from bustling. On a Sunday morning, however, there was a reason many homes were vacant. “Sure, they’re at church,” one of my companions mused, adding, “No one’ll be home till 2.” I didn’t ask why we were out so early in the morning if that was the case – not to be nice but because I was nervous for Close Encounters with the Undecideds, (certain I’d misspeak and blow the whole campaign – at least my head was in the right place…)

When we did find people at home, though, they were mostly friendly. Some a little annoyed to see a pamphlet-bearing stranger at their door, but understandably. (In fact the more I thought about it, the more surprised I was people even spoke to us, a motley crew of worn-out young women criss-crossing their streets…) Whether it was a young boy giving us the details of his parents’ absence, (“at my grandma’s mowing the lawn”), or a dreaded Undecided giving us her honest two cents, (“I don’t think I’ll really know until I’m in the voting booth”), people there were accommodating and polite.

Residents of the bordering town in which we spent the second half of the day – let’s call it Town 2 – were less welcoming. The people of Town 2 were also more affluent than their neighbors in Town 1, (a fact that was immediately apparent to us by the large homes and short grass.) The area was made up of a group of cul-de-sacs, every home the same color and style, an area in which you could easily get lost. Though we never did, the suspicious stares of people passing by and thin crack through which most doors were opened marked us as outsiders. It may have been that we were getting closer to dinnertime, it may have been the start of the basketball game, but people in Town 2, even HRC supporters, seemed mostly curt and disinterested. I drew the conclusion they were protective of their status, covetous of their prosperity. Wrong, again.

A local high school student had joined our crew. I made a comment about the stretch of identical homes: “Yeah, they’re built by the same guy: Gambini, Gamboni or something. He built all the houses where I live too.” He thought about it further: “I think he got arrested for something.” Edwards’ words came back to me then. Those two Americas, “one…that does the work, [and] another that reaps the reward”. The two Americas were not Town 1 and Town 2, they are both towns, all towns, and the Gambini/Gambonis of the world. They are the people of Pennsylvania and every other state bearing the economic brunt of a war we aren’t prepared to fight while the Vice President gets rich(er) in the process. The rest of the day, I tried to resist obvious conclusions as best I could. Since then, I have made an effort to avoid looking at things the way the polls teach us to – by race, by gender, by socioeconomics – by any way but connected by the sum of our parts, however different those parts may be.

When I stopped looking for differences, I found the most basic commonalities: work, faith, family. And was impressed by the lengths these “ordinary Americans” went to keep up their homes and community. Our day wrapped around eight p.m. and the woman I’d spent most of it with started home. A sufferer of Crohn’s disease, she is voting for Hillary Clinton because she vows to insure every American. “I live up in the mountains,” she said and gestured to herself: “One of those gun-toting hics Obama mentioned.” As I walked back to my car, I passed an older woman on her nightly walk, a fleece covered in American flags keeping her warm. “What’s that in your hands?” She indicated my stack of campaign literature. I explained and offered her a Hillary pin. “I’ll wear it to the Children’s Hospital,” she explained as I pinned it on her. “I volunteer there.”

Love,

C

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