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New Civilization News: Responsibility |
Category: Politics 6 comments 31 Oct 2004 @ 13:14 by dempstress : OK then.......you've convinced me. No more nagging! x ************************************* Were La Dempstress a nag in actual mutual living space, t'would be a Shakespearian experience...and therefore worth it---almost. o 31 Oct 2004 @ 15:28 by martha : Richard i applaud you (with two hands) for your efforts. We all need to take responsibility...each moment...with each thought and action....go Kerry go.... 31 Oct 2004 @ 18:00 by shawa : I really like it I can feel your passion, I really like it! :-) 1 Nov 2004 @ 08:30 by jazzolog : Knock & Drag That's the name of a volunteer opportunity tomorrow. At 4:00 teams will go out to every polling place in the County. We'll check the rolls to see who on our list of registered Democrats HASN'T voted yet. Then we phone 'em, and get them to a voting machine. If no answer to that phonecall, we go to the house. We knock, and when they answer we...uh---ahem. :-) Here's more~~~ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The New York Times November 1, 2004 OHIO To Get Ohio Voters to the Polls, Volunteers Knock, Talk and Cajole By JAMES DAO TOLEDO, Ohio, Oct. 31 - A light rain fell as two dozen volunteers for President Bush huddled behind a white van in a Wal-Mart parking lot here this weekend. It was game day, the start of their long-awaited, repeatedly rehearsed final push to get Republican voters to the polls on Election Day. Blue Bush-Cheney hats were distributed with neatly packed brown envelopes containing maps, voter lists and plastic ponchos. The team captain reviewed dos and don'ts. (Be polite; avoid lawns.) And then, though it was hard to believe anything had been forgotten, a volunteer muttered one more piece of advice. "Show some passion," she said. "People need to see our passion." So it goes here, throughout Ohio and, indeed, all across nearly a dozen swing states where the election is breathtakingly close. Never in the history of American presidential campaigns will so many people be called, visited, handed literature and cajoled to vote than in the final hours of this race. And the side with the better turnout game is almost certain to win the race, strategists say. "In all my years in politics, I've never seen anything like this from either party," said James Ruvolo, chairman of Senator John Kerry's campaign in Ohio. "Win, lose or draw, neither side will be able to say it didn't put enough resources into Ohio." The race's extraordinary closeness was starkly underlined by a Columbus Dispatch poll on Sunday that showed Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry both receiving just under 50 percent of the vote in this state. Out of 2,880 responses, Mr. Kerry received eight more votes than Mr. Bush, the smallest margin in the history of the respected survey. On the ground, Ohio was typical, only more so, of the nearly deafening hum of campaign activity across the nation. Democrats claimed the party had 170,000 volunteers working across the state, a figure that was impossible to confirm. Republicans said they had 85,000 field workers, while independent groups mustered tens of thousands more. Together, the two sides said they planned to call or visit more than one million homes before the polls close. For that reason, some analysts are predicting turnout in Ohio this year could surpass the 77 percent of registered voters who cast ballots in 1992, the highest in recent decades. In a clear sign that the state's 20 electoral votes remain in the balance, all four members of the two major tickets campaigned in the state on Sunday, using raucous rallies and quiet prayer to energize their bases. Mr. Bush was at Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, Vice President Dick Cheney at the airport in Toledo, Mr. Kerry at a Dayton church and Senator John Edwards in Columbus. Mr. Kerry plans to visit Cleveland and Toledo to close his campaign on Monday. But it was the buzzing activity below the big media events where the campaign duel was most ferocious. And it was not just the two parties: thousands of volunteers with independent groups, from the National Rifle Association to labor unions to evangelical churches to liberal groups like the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn, were also feverishly at work on college campuses and in housing projects, gun clubs and suburban malls across the state. The activity was so intense in Toledo this weekend that union canvassers reported finding three or four pieces of campaign literature already stuck on many doors. And volunteers at a Democratic phone bank in south Toledo said on Sunday that many people were getting angry at the repeated calls they were receiving. "I just tell them the Republicans are making the same calls, and if we don't keep up, we'll lose," said one volunteer, Jonathan Warner, 49, of Holland, Ohio. "That cheers them up." Democratic strategists argued that the flood of calls could only help their case. "You cannot remind people too often," said Mr. Ruvolo, the Kerry state chairman. "I hope people start saying 'Stop,' because that will mean we've done our job." A major wildcard in this year's Ohio campaign is a proposed state constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriages and restrict civil unions. John Green, a political scientist at Akron University, predicts the measure will increase turnout among evangelical Christians, a group that tends to vote Republican, by three to four percent over 2000. The organization that has promoted the amendment, the Ohio Campaign to Protect Marriage, has tried to increase that turnout by mailing two million Sunday bulletin inserts to 17,000 churches. It has also hired a firm to call nearly one million homes before Election Day with a recorded message from Ohio's secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, endorsing the amendment. Phil Burress, chairman of the campaign, said that thousands of Muslim and Amish people have registered to vote for the first time so they can support the amendment. "On Nov. 2, I can tell you, the church will turn out," Mr. Burress said. Voter turnout is important in every presidential election, but more so this year not only because the race is so close, but also because of record numbers of newly registered voters in many swing states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Motivating such new voters to actually go to the polls is always a challenge, experts said. In Ohio and other states, the Republicans have created programs modeled on the get-out-the-vote operations Democratic-leaning labor unions have used for decades. The Republican strategy - known as the 72 Hour Campaign, referring to a tightly scripted hour-by-hour plan for the final three days - was tested in Congressional and local races in 2002, then expanded this year with statewide recruiting and voter registration drives. That effort is culminating now, with huge volunteer drives in Republican strongholds like Cincinnati, the suburbs around Columbus and Dayton, and the rural western border with Indiana. But the Republicans are also hoping to carve into Democratic strongholds like Lucas County, which includes Toledo. On Saturday night at Bush-Cheney headquarters in a suburban Toledo office park, the parking lot was packed with 60 cars, while scores of volunteers inside called voters. Pizza boxes were stacked on long tables where workers prepared packets for canvassers. On the wall, a computer printout said: "One volunteer = 200 calls." Mr. Bush, who won only 38 percent of Lucas County in 2000, does not need to win here to defeat Mr. Kerry, Republicans contend. "If Bush is in the low to mid-40's'' in Lucas County, predicted Tom Noe, co-chairman of the Bush campaign in northwest Ohio, "he will win the state.'' Susan Aldersley, 47, from Alexandria, Va., and Mark Sass, 44, from Maumee, Ohio, are two of the party's 3,000 volunteers in Lucas County. Novice campaigners both, they knocked on more than 100 doors in the heavily Republican Toledo suburb of Sylvania on Saturday, politely asking residents to vote. They praised Halloween decorations, cooed over children and petted dogs, even as they gently importuned people to vote. "Beautiful flowers," Mr. Sass told one voter. "They're fake," she replied. But she pledged to vote for Mr. Bush. Thousands of volunteers for both parties have poured into Ohio from other states as well. Dianne Delisi, a state representative from Temple, Tex., was one of nearly 100 from a group called the Mighty Texas Strike Force that knocked on doors for the Bush campaign around Cincinnati on Sunday. "What these people tell us is they would crawl if necessary to get to the polls because they know how important it is to win Ohio," Ms. Delisi said. While Democrats acknowledge the new Republican efforts, they say they have greatly expanded their own turnout machinery with high and low-tech devices. New computer programs have improved their ability to identify Democratic voters, they say. Trick-or-treating families in Toledo distributed literature on Halloween night. And retirees in Columbus wrote personal letters to voters. But the biggest change for the Democratic side is the explosion of independent groups pushing for Mr. Bush's defeat. For months, MoveOn.org, Acorn and America Coming Together have blanketed low-income, working-class and minority neighborhoods across Ohio with literature blasting the Bush administration's policies on jobs, health care and Iraq. America Coming Together says it will have 12,000 volunteers working on Election Day. "We have more power to decide this election than voters in any other state," Maya Pinto, a 23-year-old volunteer with America Coming Together, told a woman at a Toledo housing project on Sunday. Albert Salvato contributed reporting for this article from Cincinnati. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/01/politics/campaign/01ohio.html?th=&pagewanted=all&position= 1 Nov 2004 @ 17:19 by astrid : Right on, Richard!... ....RESPONSE-Ability is what it's all about! To become aware of one's own ability to respond to Life in ways one sees as most valuable/ethical and life-promoting and supporting for ALL. LIFE is not exclusive,like uknowwho.... It is time to let those with ANY justifications/ideas/reasons for EXCLUDING any of God's Creation to exclude themselves into the oblivion they have prepeared for us who love Life (which of course includes ALL of Nature(; Animal and Plant- kingdom) They can go and find their serfes among their Own Kin on their own -original- Planet!.... or go to hell....which ever is their choise of response(- ability)! 2 Nov 2004 @ 13:31 by swan : Thank You Richard, for this passionate work. 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31 Oct 2004 @ 12:23, by Richard Carlson