December 31, 2003
A Day at Dean HQ
I want hotel blackout curtains. There's something decadent about waking up at 9:00am with the sun streaming nowhere near your eyeballs. Unfortunately, I couldn't savor the darkness for very long. I had to get moving... and Trevor was grinding his teeth in his sleep with a maddening crunching noise that made me want to chew glass.
At the DFA office, I exchanged my photo ID for a Volunteer badge and waded through empty Diet Coke bottles to a seat in the programmer's work area. Clay swept a collection of nicotine gum wrappers into a makeshift garbage can (ie. the floor) and I was ready to go.
The headquarters of a presidential campaign is about as far removed from my typical work environment as Webster Hall is from a Catholic church. On a typical busy Wednesday afternoon at CXO, someone coughs too loud and frowning faces pop over cube walls to see what all of the commotion is about. Until now, I've never experienced a "let's get someone elected president" kind of cacophony.
Up in Burlington, I was bathed in a mix of sounds that incorporated the din of crises barely averted, the hammering out of complex logistics, cries of "Did someone order a pizza?", media miners watching news clips, and a group of staffers doing a surprisingly good rendition of one of my favorite Peter Cetera songs.
But in all of that bedlam, the most disturbing sound was the baritone guffaw from the seat next to me. When Clay is laughing, it's time to duck and cover — just ask my kid. Clay seized the gauntlet thrown down by Mathew Gross in the early morning hours of New Year's Eve and garnered some blog time for his herculean effort to top the bloggers in fundraising results. And so, we added plain 'ol trash talking to the aforementioned frenzy of activity.
If all Dean for America fundraisers are half as much fun as the North Side vs. South Side (of the office) challenge, it's no wonder the campaign is raising money at a staggering rate. While I was reading blogosphere celebrity endorsements and comments on Clay's "alternative" campaign and listening to him compose responses and releases, Dave, Sarah and Trevor were attending teddy bear and brewery tours (not to mention sampling the local Magic Hat).
We ushered in the new year at the home of a Dean staffer and gracious hostess — who, like us, seems to believe that Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve is best watched from 11:58pm until 12:02am. You watch the ball drop, make sure nothing has blown up, then turn off the television. Hooray for that. (And for cats with no tails that have featured prominently in Trevor's drawings for the past few days.)
Comments
My Dad says the zeal of the Dean campaigners is similar to the zeal of the folks (like him) who backed Goldwater in 1964. His joke was, "they told me if I voted for Goldwater that the war would escalate in Vietnam. Well, I voted for Goldwater and sure enough, the war escalated in Vietnam." I laughed.