Beyond the Schlep: Notes from North Carolina

By Andrew Marantz

It is the morning after Yom Kippur, and I am trying to cram a bacon egg and cheese sandwich into my newly wizened stomach. I have just passed through security at Westchester County Airport and my belt is still unbuckled.

Across the gate, the old Jewish snowbirds are queuing up to fly south for 5769. A few decades ago, Jews still lived in Hymietown; but soon they amassed enough capital to participate in the great American tradition of white flight (which would be a fitting name for this airport’s café, come to think of it), and now many of them split their time between the inner suburbs—e.g., Westchester—and the outer suburbs: Florida.

Hence, the Great Schlep. The idea is simple: go visit your grandparents on the shuffleboard court and, while you’re down there, win them over to the Obama column by dispelling the lashon hara against him. As we know from 2000, even a few old Jews can swing an election.

A week ago, I thought I would be boarding one of these flights to Miami. I signed up for the Schlep on Facebook; I even made arrangements with my Great Aunt Jeanette to stay in her condo in Boca Raton and stump at her bridge club.

A couple days later, though, the Obama campaign offered me a job as an organizer in North Carolina—a state that has recently become the swingiest of swing states, possibly even more competitive than Florida.

Suddenly, I find myself embarking on a very different kind of schlep.

Two days later, I am striding across the lawn at 9 Mandela Court, clipboard in hand. Two men sit on their porch, sipping tall boys and smoking two-dollar packs of cigarettes, listening to Otis Redding.

They don’t know what to make of me at first. They shade their eyes and squint in my direction, and their boisterous conversation slows to a halt. I have to assume it’s because white people don’t come around here.

But I know the drill. I keep walking, my head up, and drop the O-bomb as soon as I can: “Good morning. I’m here with the Obama campaign.”

“You here for Obama? Oh, you know you all right with us now. Come on up here, Obama man.” I climb the three steps to the porch. “What you need? We all registered and everything.”

“And you’re planning to vote early?” I ask.

“Oh, you know we votin early. We gettin all our people out to the polls soon as they open up. We ain’t playin down here. We about to take this one.”

“Watch out, now!” adds his friend. “It’s some black people gonna vote this year!”

Meanwhile, the owner of the house has drifted outside to check on the commotion. He does not join in the banter but looks at my face, very serious, so that when he opens his mouth I think he is going to tell my fortune.

“I gotta say, man,” he says, “you know—you know you look like Dustin Diamond, right?”

This takes me a second. “Dustin Diamond? As in, Screech?”

He nods, just the hint of a smile around his lips.

“That can’t be a compliment,” I say.

He does not deny it.

“Well, you know what?” I retort. “I think you look like Jaleel White.”

The joke works. Now his smile is full-blown.

I hand them all the flyers I have—a caravan to the polls next weekend, a list of the down-ballot Democratic candidates, all the Early Voting locations in the county—and turn to be on my way. They want me to stay and talk football with them, but I tell them I don’t know anything about football, and besides, I have to hit fifty more doors before dark.

“Man, don’t worry about before dark, you stay as long as you want. You can go anywhere you want to in this neighborhood. Ain’t nobody gonna mess with Obama man.”

As I hop down the steps and head for 11 Mandela, my cell phone rings. It’s Aunt Jeanette. “So nu, I haven’t heard from you. I take it you’re not coming to Boca?”

Oh, Aunt Jeanette, if only I could express how very far I am from Boca right now.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, an opponent of the Great Schlep. All pro-Obama canvassing is fine by me. Every vote counts; and if you’re preaching to your own kin, at least you know they’ll listen.

Still, by the measure of “every vote counts,” the Great Schlep is far from the most effective game in town. It’s simple math: why spend two days turning only two votes?

Now, if it’s between two votes and zero, I’ll take two. But the Schlep seems more like a cute publicity stunt than a serious canvassing effort. The numbers bear that out: of the seven million people who viewed the Sarah Silverman video and the 22,000 who joined the group on Facebook, only 100 people actually made the Schlep.

Let me reiterate: I am not trying to hate. As a field organizer, out-of-state volunteers are my personal heroes. But why stop at your grandparents? Why not set up a press junket in the local Hadassah chapter? Why not spend the Jewish Sabbath on the golf course and the Christian one in the housing projects? Even better—why not check with the local Obama office and ask what they want you to do?

I think we can blame the media, as usual. Since pundits like to speak in terms of demographics, we end up with misleading statements like, “If only those confused Jewish ladies hadn’t voted for Pat Buchannan, Gore would have won in 2000.” This is perfectly true: 537 more Jewish votes would have delivered the election to Gore. So would have 537 Haitian votes, 537 truck-driver votes, 537 college sophomore votes, or 537 Scorpio votes. Democracy is not reducible to demography. Democracy does not care if you’re circumcised. To win Florida, Obama does not have to win “the Jews,” per se; he has to win votes.

The man at the next house, 11 Mandela Court, is not thrilled to see me at first—it’s Sunday, and it looks like he was napping—but by the end of our chat, he has agreed to volunteer with me next week. He has just moved down from Maryland, and it seems like he wants an excuse to meet his new neighbors.

At 13 Mandela, a teenager answers the door. I ask him if everyone in the house is planning to vote early.

“Yeah, everybody in the house is going. Not my grandmother—she’s Jehovah’s Witness—but everybody else.”

“How about you?”

“Not me. I’m not eighteen yet.”

“When’s your birthday?”

“Halloween.”

I tell him that if he turns eighteen before November 4, he can vote.

“Oh word?” Teenage boys don’t show much emotion, but he looks pretty excited.

As I head back to my car, I see that the man from #11 has already succeeded in meeting his neighbors, the three men on the porch. They offer him a beer, and, apart from giving him guff for being a Redskins fan, they seem to be getting along fine. Maybe it is the campaign propaganda fogging my brain, but I can’t help thinking that the Obama movement—not the presidency, yet, but the campaign itself—is already forging community. As Young Jeezy says in “My President is Black,” his new single: “Win lose or draw, we congratulate you already, homie.”

By the end of the day I have knocked on 55 doors, in between running to Kinko’s, marching in a Homecoming parade, and repeatedly forgetting to eat. At night, back at the office, I make 106 phone calls and enter pages of data. I can’t know for sure how many of the people I talked to would not have voted for Obama, or voted at all, if I hadn’t reached them. I’m sure there were at least a handful. A few handfuls a day, and the number can quickly add up to 537, or a few thousand, or a few electoral votes.

Maybe one of these days I’ll call up some of Aunt Jeanette’s friends and try to schmooze them into submission. But right now, frankly, I don’t have time.

What do you think?