Jdavej’s Weblog

Salon.com called the election for Obama about 5 minutes ago!  Time to watch the landslide and the Congressional races.  Both Mark Udall and Betsy Markey are ahead here in Colorado, both of which will be pickups for the Dems!

It is 7:16 here in Denver, and I am home drinking a beer, watching the results crawl in from the eastern states.   My job here is done and it is time to party.  As of right now,  CNN is showing Obama ahead 174-64 in electoral votes.  With Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and California accounting for 77 comfortable Obama EV’s, that is only 19 votes from President Obama!  It is so close I can taste it.  What an historic moment.

Election Day is finally here and whatever happens, we will make history this day.

It is 1:40 p.m. here in Denver–just over 6 hours before the polls close.  There is an air of quiet confidence throughout the AFL-CIO State Federation office here, where I am in charge of one of several phone banks calling people across this state to make sure that they have voted.  From the reports I am hearing from our satellite offices, and what I hear from my phoners, the great majority of people have already voted.  Reports from our poll watchers during the early morning rush said that there were only a couple of locations that had lines approaching an hour.  All of the other locations where we had people were reporting short lines and fairly light turnout through the first couple of hours.  That all fits the Secretary of State’s report that close to 50% of the eligible voters had voted prior to today, as well as our canvassers and leafleters reports of close to 85% of the people they were encountering saying that they had already voted.  And that kind of turnout generally bodes well for Democratic candidates.

It is an interesting feeling to be at this point where all of what I have been through in Colorado over the last five months, and all that all of us have been through over the past couple of years, is reaching its climax.  We are just hours away from crossing the finish line, and everything I see or hear tells me we are well out in front.  But now is not the time to let up.  If you have not yet voted, VOTE!  If you have already voted, call ten of your friends or family members and make sure that they have voted.  If you’ve done both of those, go to www.barackobama.com and follow the links to make more calls into battleground states to make sure those people have voted.

Finally, when the polls have finally closed tonight, take a deep breath, say a quick prayer, and head to a party to celebrate the beginning of turning our country around.  But, don’t party too much.  We have a big job ahead of us.  And it begins tomorrow morning.

So, it’s Sunday night, November 2, 2008.  Less than 48 hours from now, the polls will be closed across the country and all that will be left is to count the ballots.  I suspect by this time (10:45 MST) we’ll all know who the next President of the United States will be.  And, we’ll have a pretty darned good idea of what’s happening with Congress as well.  I happen to feel really good about where the election is at this point.  I may be a bit of an optimist, but I’ve also put my money where my mouth is and bought non-refundable airline tickets and hotel space to be in Washington, D.C. for the inauguration.  And I don’t plan on being there to see John McCain sworn in.

On the other hand, my much repeated quote is still operative–”I don’t want to wake up on Wednesday, November 5, wondering what one more thing I could have done.”  With anywhere from 2/3 to 3/4 of the votes already cast in Colorado (from what I have heard) there is not quite as much pressure on our Get Out The Vote effort as there might otherwise have been. But that is not slowing us down one bit in the effort to contact as many voters as possible to make sure that they have voted.  I can’t tell you complete numbers, but our release staff and volunteers have contacted 10’s of thousands of union and working-family supporting voters across the state in the last two days.  And we are just going to increase the effort and energy up until the polls close at 7 p.m. on Tuesday.  

It is pretty darned amazing to see the people who are coming in, both those from Colorado and from out of state, and the determination that they have to make sure that this election puts the people in office that will begin to turn this country around. Whether it is the people like Ron and Mick, who are giving their time and effort, even while trying to find work, or the young woman attorney who came in this evening to make phone calls for an hour, sheepishly admitting that she feels like she should have been doing more, sooner, the determination to make sure that this election does not slip through all of our fingers is palpable.  

There is much about my experience here in Denver that has been frustrating and even infuriating.  But at this point, none of that matters.  Tonight, tomorrow, and Tuesday is all about making sure that all of the work of so many people over the last months is not for naught.  

Wednesday morning we start building a new world.

It is now less than a week until the polls close and the results of all of our, and many other’s, hard work begin to roll in.  As a retired air traffic controller, I have often been asked if the job is as stressful as people have heard.  It is stressful, but in a different way than most people think.  There is stress involved in working a huge rush, complicated by thunderstorms and lots of reroutes all coming together in your airspace.  But that kind of stress–that adrenalin rush–is what most of us live for.  As I told a rather special someone in my life a little earlier this evening, this final four days, I suspect, is going to be like working that rush, played out over a bit longer period of time.  It will be exhausting, but exhilarating.

The final ten days started on Sunday with a huge rally in downtown Denver for Barack Obama.  Almost our entire relief staff met at the Colorado Education Association’s headquarters at 8:30 in the morning to collect stickers and literature to pass out, encouraging the people at the rally to vote “No” on Amendments 54, 49, & 47.  Barbara Shailor, the AFL-CIO’s Director of International Affairs, and my partner in soliciting volunteers to work our final four days, and I thought that we might have a productive time signing up union member volunteers while they waited in line to enter the event.  With the line at over two miles long, it seems that we should have been right.  And I think, from what I saw at the rally in Pueblo about a month ago, we would have been right.  But, where the Pueblo rally was held in warm enough  weather that everyone was proudly wearing their union t-shirts, it was cold enough on Sunday in Denver, that everyone was well bundled up in coats and jackets–making it almost impossible to pick out union members in the line.  

While that was a disappointing set back to our plans, it was wonderful to see the crowds of people arrive. By shortly after the gates were scheduled to open at 10, the organizers were already telling people that there were 50,000 people inside the secure area and that no one else, beyond a certain point in line, would be able to get inside.  They were instead directed to the front lawn of the Capitol and the parts of Civic Center Park outside of the security fence.  Even while all of that was going on, there was a steady stream of people walking up from beyond the Capitol grounds.  It was amazing to see the size of the crowd gathering.  But, what was even more positive was the almost total lack of negativity.  There was one McCain supporter who drove past the gathering, yelling out his car window a bunch of hateful, right-wing-media-inspired comments.  But even that was met with laughter from the gathering crowd. The hope and positive energy surrounding the crowd that would grow to a reported “more than 100,000″ was amazing, powerful, and hopeful.

That uplifting experience was balanced, however, by my experience on Monday evening back at the AFL-CIO headquarters.  As my many volunteers arrived to work our phone bank, we started putting them on our computer-based dialer for the first time in a month.  Since we had not used those computers for phone banking for so long, headsets were missing and had to be found, some of the computers did not recognize the dialers or their software without quite a bit of trouble shooting, and others (being old and cantankerous pieces of sh*t) started failing as soon as we started making calls.  And, of course, they didn’t all fail either at the same time or evenly spaced over a long enough timeline to allow for them to be dealt with one at a time.  It was almost pure chaos.  It made for a long and frustrating evening.

Tuesday started on a much more positive note, as we gathered all of our satellite office leads and trainers to discuss the plans for our GOTV (Get Out The Vote) effort. Again, the positive energy I felt at the rally on Sunday permeated the air.  There were questions and concerns expressed.  But every one present was there to be part of a team that is going to do everything in its power to turn out our fellow union and Working America members to win this historic election.  We could feel it. We could taste it. And we could breathe in the positive energy of all of our colleagues. And, we know that none of us are going to let up one tiny bit until the polls are closed!

Then, the real positive energy for me came during the evening phone banks.  Once again, two volunteers in particular, showed me the soul of trade unionism in this state and country.

I mentioned one of them before. Mick is an out-of-work electrician who is spending a huge part of his time (while waiting for a call for a job from his union) working for the Obama campaign, the Udall campaign, and the Labor 2008 campaign.  he is not wallowing in self-pity over not having a job, though that would certainly be understandable.  He is giving all that he has to fight against those who have run the financial ship of this country into the ground and for those who will fight to even the playing field for hard-working people like him.  And, he is making sure that his kids understand what is going on and how they can help change the world.  What an inspiration!

The other was a first-time volunteer phone banker named Max.  He battled the software and the computer all night–not being the most computer literate person in the room–to make phone call after phone call, even trying to log back in after I had logged him out of the system because it was too late to make more calls.  Max was fighting for all of the good things that unions stand for.  He was calling people to make sure that they understand just how important it is to elect people who understand what it means to work long, hard hours to barely scrape by and be able to support yourself and a family.  We discussed how there has been, and is, a decades long war against the working class people in this country.  How, if someone points that out, they are accused of “class warfare” while the real class warfare has been going on for years–and the middle class is losing.  

The drive and desire to beat back these attacks and to make the system and the rules work for ALL of us once again is what I see in people like Mick and Max.  And it is that drive and desire that has made this past five months worthwhile to me.  

So, what drive and desire inspires you?  What drive and desire do you have to share with others in this battle?  What are you going to do over this last week to make sure that we win every battle we can?  And then, what are you going to do on November 5th, and beyond, to make sure that the people we elect do those things that we elected them to do?

This is the eve of, probably, my final day off before election day. We invited all of the Colorado Release Staff, the Working America staff, and the FRESC staff to join us at kareoke at the Lookin’ Good club tonight–our last chance to blow off steam before the final stretch. We had people from Colorado, California, Texas, Washington, Washington, D.C., Louisiana, and a few other states, representing many different unions, gathered together to enjoy each other’s company, and a few bad songs.

We do come from different backgrounds, and for different reasons, to fight together for the same purpose–to better the lot of working families throughout this country, and the world. Between these three groups, as of the start of today, we had knocked on almost 200,000 doors in Colorado, hoping to educate our members, and the working classes in this state to the need to defeat amendments 47, 49, and 54, as well as to elect Barack Obama, Mark Udall, and Congressional Democrats. The middle class in this country, and the American Dream we were taught to pursue, are under attack. But we have the opportunity to beat back the attacks in this year’s elections. And, by pulling together, we are poised to do just that. And a night like tonight gives us the energy and enthusiasm to do just that.

We are battling for every man, woman, and child in this country who believes that the American dream means that an honest day’s work means that you will be paid an honest day’s wage. For those that believe that an increase in productivity means an increase in salary. And for those who understand that “greed” is not the central, unifying belief that rules this country.

For well over 50 years, we have been fed a line of crap that says that those who toil for a living are not the equals of those who finance that toil. And that to point that out is somehow to threaten to very system that this country was founded on. We have been told that government workers are all overpaid and underworked. That the private sector can do everything cheaper than the public sector–and that that is a good thing. We have seen, in the last six weeks, a candidate ridiculed for saying that paying your fair share of the cost of running and defending this country is our patriotic duty. As if the cost of financing these endless wars of aggression should be born only by those who are too stupid, or unaware, to demand that the costs are placed on another sector of our populace.

It is time to stand up to those who believe that they are above the rest of us–those who believe that they are above sharing in the costs of maintaining our way of life, even while screaming that the government must do everything it can to attack and control any country that might think about standing up for itself, against our self-interest. This election is about reclaiming that wealth, that commonality, that the purveyors of greed would have us give up. It is about restoring the opportunity that they claim is under attack by the efforts to rebuild that opportunity.

We have an historic chance to turn around America. We dare not let it go.

Early voting is already taking place in Colorado and Texas, as well as a number of other states. And the actual election day is less than two weeks away. It’s time to vote. And to encourage your friends and relatives to vote. It is time to tell those who would continue to give more and more of the wealth generated in this country to a smaller and smaller group of people that enough is enough. It is time to reclaim our heritage and our dreams. It is time to VOTE! for the change that we need and can believe in. It is time to elect Barack Obama as our next President, Mark Udall and Rick Noriega as our next US Senators, and as many other Progressive candidates as possible.

And then it is past time to realize and remember that November 4th is not the end. It is the beginning of the change that we must see in this country and this world!

We are now less than three weeks until election day. Working in a battleground state–perhaps THE battleground state–I know all too well how frustrated people are getting with all of the attention they are getting leading up to the election. While I do appreciate and understand the frustration with answering (or dodging) the same questions over and over, I also appreciate how important this election is, and how much effort each of our volunteers is putting in to making sure that no union member, or affiliate member, votes without the knowledge to make an informed decision in all of our best interests.

There were two volunteers at our phone bank, last night, that I particularly want to mention. Ron and Mick are both members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 68, who have been out of work for a number of months. I have watched other people I know go through the difficulty, frustration, and questioning that comes with being an out-of-work bread-winner for their family. It is the kind of thing that can render one helpless. But these two men are taking the fight right back to the powers-that-be that have caused them to be in the economic situation in which they find themselves. Tonight, in the third and final debate of the 2008 Presidential campaign, John McCain accused Barack Obama of engaging in class warfare. The truth of the matter is that class-warfare has been going on for a couple of decades–and the middle-class is loosing.

We can sit back and commiserate with one another, or we can run to the middle of the street and scream. Ron and Mick are in the street screaming to every union member they can find. It isn’t easy sometimes to spread this word to people, especially those who don’t see things from the same perspective. But, it is the only way we can begin to turn around this country. Today it looks like we are heading towards wins in every race in which we are participating. But nothing can be taken for granted. The race is not over ten yards from the finish line. The only poll that matters is the one that closes on election night. Ron and Mick are doing everything they can to make sure the outcome is the best it can be for people like them. What are YOU doing?

We have reached the final month of the campaign in a battleground state. And not just any battleground state, but the one that is arguably THE battleground state. For the people who live here, that means non-stop radio and television commercials, both from the various candidates and from many different interest groups. It also means a lot more phone calls and visits from people working for all of the different organizations who are concerned about the outcome of the election. And the unions area certainly one of the organizations concerned about the outcome of this election, made even more so by the attacks on collective bargaining that have been launched with the Amendments 47, 49, & 54. Union members from across the country are coming to Colorado to help educate members in this state and fight to win the elections.

Saturday we had one of the largest precinct walks so far this year, with about 150 people gathered at the Colorado AFL-CIO State Federation office to get instruction and walk packets before fanning out across the city to knock on doors. National leaders from many unions were on hand to encourage the volunteers and even to knock on a few doors themselves. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney visited with a few members at their doors before joining the returning walkers for speeches and burgers. Averaging about 40 houses each, that many walkers should have knocked on about 6000 doors across Denver in just under three hours.

With that many people gathered in one parking lot, you might expect a high level of energy. But instead what I felt was a sense of quiet intensity. There was a focus on the battle at hand and the specific work to be done. And a commitment to be back to do it again as often as necessary to win.

On Sunday, a different group of union members and national leaders gathered in Denver, Colorado Springs, and Longmont to repeat the event. Close to a hundred members of federal employee unions rallied at those three locations to knock on doors and make phone calls in support of Barack Obama, Mark Udall, Betsy Markey, and the three anti-worker amendments 47, 49, & 54. In Longmont, about 30 current and retired air traffic controllers met to hear from NATCA National Legislative Committee Chair Patricia Gilbert and Northwest Mountain Regional Vice President Scott Farrow before spreading through the community to talk to fellow union members. With one of the largest gatherings of NATCA members for this kind of political action, there was a real buzz of energy as they gathered to get their instructions and walk packets. And to see national level officers and retired controllers walking side-by-side with active duty NATCA members showed the commitment to the safety of the flying public and to the system and career that each of these people had chosen.

This election, whether we are talking about beating back attacks on collective bargaining such as Amendments 47, 49, & 54, or working to win the election of candidates like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mark Udall, and Betsy Markey, if about protecting and reinvigorating the middle class in this country. Class warfare has been going on in this country for decades and all too many union members have stepped away from the fight rather than be accused of being divisive. We are not stepping away from the fight any longer.

One of the ways that unions get information to their members in a campaign such as this is to hand out informational leaflets, or flyers, at job sites. Unfortunately, due to restrictions in the Hatch Act designed to protect federal employees against unfair political manipulation at work, materials supporting one side or another in a partisan political campaign are not allowed to be displayed on or in federal property. This makes getting leaflets to federal employees at the jobsite a bit more problematic, though not impossible.

Wednesday morning, the other two NATCA release staff members in Colorado and I met some active NATCA members outside Denver Center in Longmont. For those of you who don’t know much, or anything, about air traffic control and the different types of facilities, an Air Route Traffic Control Center (or just Center) is the largest of the types of air traffic control facilities in the system. These facilities provide radar services to aircraft during the major portion of their flight–the portion between airports. They typically employ between 300 and 500 air traffic controllers and are open constantly. A smaller airport’s tower, in contrast, might have between 5 and 15 controllers, and a larger airport’s tower, such as Denver International Airport, is authorized to have 60-80 controllers. So, a Center provides the best opportunity to catch the most number of union members in the same location.

So, Wednesday morning about 11:15, Chris McKeever, Dennis Zoss, two active duty controllers (we were later joined by another) and I arrived on the public sidewalk outside of the front gate of Denver Center, just in time to catch employees arriving for shifts that start at noon. We quickly handed literature to employees in their cars as they were entering and exiting the facility. Of course, exercising our constitutionally protected rights to support politicians who would force management to return to the collective bargaining table and complete the contract negotiations they walked out of over two years ago was upsetting to the management staff within the facility. So they called the police.

When the two police cars pulled up to the gate, while two others circled the scene (that’s right 4 cars to deal with 5 people handing out pieces of paper) they informed management that they could do nothing about us being on the public sidewalk and informed us that we could not stop any cars proceeding in or out of the facility as that would be considered obstructing traffic. Now, they had a point on the cars entering the facility (though the exchange typically lasted less than 10 seconds), but I question the point on cars exiting the facility as they had to come to a complete stop before entering the roadway anyway. But we complied and remained on the sidewalk, waving our signs which displayed the fact that NATCA has endorsed the Obama/Biden ticket.

However, that was still not enough to appease management in the building. By the time the police arrived we had probably handed out no more than 15 sets of flyers, as the noon shift change is not a major one. But the facility manager got on the intercom and informed everyone in the building that possession of the material we had been passing out was a Hatch Act violation and he threatened to fire everyone who committed what he considered to be a Hatch Act violation. Now, there are two really great parts to this that really help to sum up why NATCA holds so much of the FAA’s management in such high regard. At no time did the currently employed NATCA members hand out any of the political flyers–they remained on the public sidewalk, or across the street, waving our signs. So the people this manager threatened to fire are all retired–not exactly subject to any termination procedures that might have been threatened or implemented. On an even better note, since we had not handed out many flyers, and most of those to people leaving the facility, there were very few union members inside that even knew that we were out there. At least until the manager made them ALL aware of our presence and purpose with his intercom announcement. You just can’t make this stuff up.

So, thanks Denver Center management. We couldn’t have spread our message so widely without your help.

October 6 is the deadline to register to vote in the general election–this extremely important Presidential election–in both Texas and Colorado. Please, encourage everyone (okay not the trolls who are going to vote for McCain, as if they would listen to you anyway) to register before Monday. Additionally encourage everyone, including those who know they have been registered to vote for years, to verify that they are actually registered. You can check through the Secretary of State’s office in most states, or through www.voteforchange.org. It only takes a couple of minutes.

While most of the people who read this blog are probably not in any danger of being purged from the voter roles, 19,000 voters have been purged from the voter registration roles in the Denver area in the last couple of weeks alone. And the Colorado Secretary of State has directed voter registrars across the state to not accept new voter registrations from many people who recently registered because they overlooked, or forgot, to check a box on the form. A box that is not on all voter registration forms in the state, just those that groups conducting voter registration drives are required to use. This is part of a larger effort identified in many states to purge the voter registration roles–states including Texas and Colorado.

So, please, encourage everyone you know to not only register before Monday, but to verify that they are registered early enough to allow themselves time to re-register, if necessary, before Monday, October 6.