In the campaign

This is written for the book, not the blog. It will go in the first "Monster" section, though I am not yet quite sure about the placement in sequence. But some friends who were involved with the campaign wanted to see what I wrote, so I thought I would put it here. It talks about my experiences working on the Hillary campaign in Waterloo.

At the end are three pictures of the actual office, taken by Liz Seffrin.

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After years of stress and horror as she slipped into querulous and tyrannical dementia, my mother died. Eleventh months later, my father died. Both had died in freak accidents that I held  myself remotely responsible for, both after the decision to pull the plug in identical ICU rooms looking out over the same curve of road and bleak and sodden stretch of forest. Six weeks later, the week I saw the first signs of spring, I broke my ankle. There I was alone at home except for the mornings when a helper came, or when I got a ride to school to teach my classes, stunned by the wreckage. Everything familiar had collapsed, and freedom loomed obscurely in a deferred distance. What would my life be like now, with my time my own and an inheritance, but even less connection? Would we have a woman president? With so much time to fill during endless housebound hours, I started to read and post on Twitter more, as a space to be as passionately pro-Hillary as I felt like without alienating everyone I knew in real life. Twitter also gave me a space to enjoy my new hobby of worshiping Beyonce, whom almost none of my friends seemed to appreciate. “Formation” had come out not long before and taken over my thoughts for weeks, as I played it over and over and read every interpretation I could find. Finally, by mid-summer, something like normalcy arrived again and I  embraced it with joy, walking my dog who had come back from the friends who were caring for her. By that time, though, the full dinning of hatred, the impossibility of Trump as candidate become a reality. My father had died in February, before the New York primary even, when it still seemed ridiculous.

When I got a call from the local campaign in August asking me to volunteer, I started to say no because there is nothing I dread more than making phone calls to strangers except the prospect of making undesired phone calls to strangers to talk about politics, the sort of calls I tended to hang up quickly on myself. But then the young woman’s voice on the line said I could do data entry instead, so I felt I had no excuse and agreed to come to the training session. I thought it would be a busy room full of aspirants, but there were only two of us.

Soon enough Mica, an older woman I knew slightly, and I were the Data Captains for our small city, spending two nights a week in the downtown storefront office, loading and scrolling and clicking and making notes on our laptops reporting the results of phone and canvassing contacts on endless lists.

The long, narrow storefront office in the old building in Waterloo’s little east side downtown, up the block from the Mexican restaurant and a few doors down from the strip club. Across the street from the Irish pub. Sitting in the fishbowl of light as the darkness fell. No one had thought about how that office looked in years, a warren of large tables and folding chairs under terrible chartreuse and turquoise walls, fluorescent tubes buzzing overhead. Unloved bookcases with haphazard pamphlets and window signs and weird figurines that had come from who knows where. A hanging stuffed Uncle Sam. The standing flag. The map of Iowa pinned to the wall. And high on the back wall, an ancient velvet blanket of the kind you can buy in truck stops and flea markets depicting John F. Kennedy. Every night I fantasized about ripping it down. Such an embarrassment.

For a few months the people I met became my new family. And my heroes. Liz from Iowa, a recent graduate of my university, the one who recruited me. Brainy Alex from Houston by way of New York, a gay Muslim man. Ingela from Utah. Meshelle from Chicago, someone I would have never known in my former life there. And all the others I met along the way. Glorious Vikki, a local leader, who descended on occasion like the arrival of our very own Beyonce. All the volunteers who came and left, putting in their time making calls. There was talk and laughter amidst the unending hours of work. There were terrible snacks to pick at or resist.

Walking to the car afterwards, looking at the streetscape. Sometimes in the darkness with the looming shapes of old buildings, bowls of petunias lining the sidewalk, the half-desolate city almost felt like a place. This was where I’d lived for seventeen years. I wanted to believe in it. We were crucial for the state. Western Iowa is deeply red and rural, Steve King country; going blue depended upon the urban centers in eastern and central Iowa.

Being a data entry volunteer gave me a distinctive mix of feelings: complete, vaguely embarrassed humility, because every person making actual calls or, at the end, getting on the street was doing more direct and meaningful work. And yet the field organizers assured us our data entry was essential too. The drive to keep going, go faster, always finish everybody’s sheets by the end of the night, because still we would leave and the organizers wouldn’t be gone yet. And it felt so good, doing this thing where I saw people and got to know them without having to talk any more than I wanted, to have a task to focus on that allowed the pleasures of participating in silence. I was good at it. Compared to the eternal uncertainties of teaching, it was a pleasure to feel competent in something requiring little thought.

Sometimes celebrities on the campaign trail came to call, but I tried to keep entering data while I listened. 

And at another level I felt thrilled, powerful. I was helping Hillary win, and that was what mattered, even if I was the lowest of the low. I wasn’t just posting memes or articles like most people I knew. Living in Iowa during in 2008 and 2016 I had seen her in person twice and spoken with her once, but I did not crave any present or future recognition from her. Only to love and serve; how glad I was to be there, doing the most menial and inglorious work in her name. Thinking about her courage, the innumerable recountings of her kindness and concern for people, even those met only passingly, her sufferings, her kind face. Even her human awkwardness or missteps. She wanted so passionately to help. I worried about the exhaustion she must feel, about all the emotions she had to keep at bay. How did she brush off the incalculable amounts of hatred coming at her? The lies about her acts, her motivations, her life story? Because even the smallest encounters with hostility dismayed and terrified me.

I thought how Hillary represented a mother figure for me. Professional, accomplished, feminist, like my mother now gone, with her one child, her only daughter, just like me. Of course I wanted to be with her now. Seeing her be president would be the new thing that would replace what I had lost. After the election I would be safe to figure out the rest of my life in a new mother-country. And I thought of how she was also my sister, a Seven Sisters graduate like me, and the truth that this was part of my very deepest bond with her, that I could not explain to outsiders: I knew her, knew the young her, knew the college world she came from and how its aspirations and pride shape and stay with you. The seriousness and the sisterhood. Nothing anyone could say touched that. (Later, after the election, Steven Bannon would mock feminists as “Seven Sisters dykes”; how strange, this thing I literally was, being made a trope for laughable monstrosity. But then we claimed it as a term of pride, and people made designs you could order on t-shirts and hoodies and other gear, I hashtagged it on my Twitter profile.)

I thought about how Hillary was a queen. Now that I followed Beyonce, whose work was in no way meant for me, whom I had no right whatsoever to claim, the notion seemed more important and less foolish to work with. I thought about loving women who are brave and glorious, and the deep satisfaction I find in loving them from a distance. Such love is what I have always been best at, it seems.

It felt like we were an underground movement. Strangely, to not only intend to vote for Hillary as the nominee but to love her made one feel like a dissenter. Meeting in our online conventicles, as we sought spaces where we would not be attacked and shamed. Pantsuit Nation, which later became public and problematic; there was a Seven Sisters group too. Bonding with the others who love what you love. We were already the resistance, resisting the ceaseless media narrative that we were voting for her without enthusiasm. We were made to feel relentlessly, monstrously, female in our allegiance, in our identification.

Again and again, when there was bad news in the campaign or people voiced frustration that the yard signs weren’t coming or the lies seemed to be gaining traction, we would grapple with floods of fear. What if she didn’t win? How could that be? And yet it seemed to become possible. How could such a world be one it was possible to exist in? To go to the office was the thing that kept me steady, I could feel. Don’t think, just help. Just be part of it, with the others. And then I could sleep at night.

Beyonce performed for the campaign a few nights before the election, she and her dancers in pantsuits. The overtly feminist Beyonce, her voice cracking and trembling with nerves when she ceased performing to speak in plain human words her support and the importance of voting. So many of us wept in joy and terror as we watched on TV. Just days to wait and we could see the closest things we might ever witness to the fulfillment of a women’s revolution. It felt like it had begun already in the beautiful dancing under the stadium lights. In what seemed her irresistible power.

The night before the election comedian Samantha Bee called passionately on women to vote. She talked about how “Hillary Clinton” had been made into a “fake robot politician,” and concluded, “Look, if you can’t bring yourself to vote for Hillary Clinton, I get it. I’m not voting for Hillary Clinton either. I’m voting for Hillary Goddamn Brilliant Badass Queen Beyoncé Rodham.” It had all come together. Hillary my college sister, and Beyonce, and everything I could imagine loving in a woman, everything I could imagine wanting to be.

On election day I wore my pantsuit to teach American Literature; we weren’t supposed to be political on campus, but I figured it was already obvious whom I supported, whom any reasonable English major was going to vote for, and I wanted them to witness the cultural moment, to remember.

After class it was all hands on deck in the UAW hall for phone banking. It was too late for data to be gathered and sent in online, so I finally overcame my fear and started making calls myself. I had been listening to people do it for so long now it intimidated me less, and the questions were simple and concrete: have you voted, will you vote, do you know where to vote. So I pushed myself through that door. Nervously eating corn chips and baby carrots and M&Ms from the food people had begun to assemble for the results-watch and victory party that would be held there.

The first results started coming in. They were strangely bad. I had to run home briefly to take my dog out, and, I thought, change into something a little more comfortable than the pantsuit I’d been wearing all day. At home I checked my phone and the results seemed worse and worse. I lay down on my bed and started following Twitter. I did not get up or go back.

The next morning, I walked my dog in the woods in shock and in fear. Trump supporters howling and vaunting his name in turgid joy. I had never felt so vulnerable. Woman, lesbian, Jew, was all I could think. My parents gone, who would protect me? Who would comfort me? Where could I go now that I was free, so terribly free? Suddenly we were in a different historical era from the one my parents had lived and died in, and I was alone in it. I passed two middle-aged men walking the trail in the opposite direction and made my face stone, could not meet their eyes. My heart pounded.

And how could I teach American literature, in this new country?

All that my field-organizer friends had sacrificed, months of their only, precious lives. And now they would go their ways, with nothing but clear consciences to show. And I might well never see them again. Another family gone.

We did win Black Hawk County, one of a small handful in Iowa to go blue.

The winter of despair and terror began.



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The office with the JFK blanket:

View to the street:

Mica and I doing our data thing: