Saturday, March 3, 2012

What I Learned from Making Calls for Rick Santorum

I volunteered to make phone calls for Rick Santorum a few weeks back, and finally had time to make some calls yesterday. I chose to call voters in Ohio, because it is an important state in terms of delegates, and one of the bellwethers for the national mood.  Here is what I found:

Obviously I was calling undecided voters, for the most part.  Only once in the 2-hours of calling did I have someone say he was an Obama supporter.  It was odd and more than a little creepy.  It reminded me of when I asked a man at a micro-soccer match if he would volunteer at our parish festival.  Both responses were full of smarmy self-importance and superiority, like talking to a philosophy professor who believes he is Neitzsche's superman.  Neither were interested in conversation.

Two of my calls resulted in lengthy conversations of over 40 minutes.  I'm pretty sure these were very lonely elderly people.  They both said they couldn't decide between Romney and Santorum.  Both had some serious misinformation about Rick's spending record and his social policies.  Both used network news as their primary news source, and both were dissatisfied with the obvious lack of coverage for Rick.  If you want to know about Ricks spending, read this from the Weekly Standard.

Most of the people hung up in as little time as possible.  I don't blame them.  I was a telemarketer throughout grad-school to pay the bills.  I didn't relish doing that again, but extreme times call for extreme measures.

I spoke with one sweet woman for about 20 minutes.  She was sad and confused.  She wanted to vote for Rick, but wanted to be sure he could beat Obama.  I discussed the polls that showed Rick beating BHO, and we were coming to an agreement.  Then the tornado sirens went off in the background.  She said it looked like it would miss her, and seemed willing to stay on the phone.  I thanked her for her time and told her to get to a safe place.  God bless her.  I hope she's okay.

As I finished my calls, I realized how afraid so many in this country are feeling.  And the others are towering over us, giddy with power.

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