Around 8:55 this morning — and remember, today's Sunday — a lady came to my door to urge me to vote for Mark Meuser…and I actually had to ask her who Mark Meuser is. Turns out he's the Republican candidate for Senate in my state, California.
Before we get to the futility of her mission, let's discuss the bad judgement shown by ringing doorbells this early on Sunday morning. I was up but I'm often not up at 8:55 AM. I would think anyone who rings doorbells before 10 or so, no matter how worthy their cause, is going to piss off more people than they convince. In fact, I think that if I wanted to get Mark Meuser elected, I'd go door-to-door even earlier, waking folks up and telling them to vote for his opponent, Alex Padilla.
Now, to the futility: The reason I didn't know who Mark Meuser is is that even though I keep better informed than most voters, I haven't seen or read a word about this race. I get tons of mail that seeks to impress upon me the critical urgency to save mankind as we know it by voting for a certain candidate or a certain way on some proposition. But neither Meuser nor Padilla has sent me so much as a postcard.
There's probably a simple explanation for this. There isn't a lot of polling of a race like this but the ones that exist all have Padilla (D) beating Meuser (R) by around 65% to 35%. That's how California is these days. Even Trump didn't spend a nickel in the '20 election campaigning here. I'm not sure he even insisted he won the state and was cheated. Meuser has about the same chance of winning as I do and I'm not even on the ballot. For Congress, I have my choice of two candidates, both Democrats.
The lady on my front porch and I had a brief conversation that we both knew was not going to swing my vote to this guy I'd never heard of. Her outstanding issue — her sign of the pending apocalypse — is the price of gas, which she blames on Democrats, though she can't explain why. Me, I've decided to blame the price of gas on the people who set the price of oil and on every politician who won't vote to regulate those prices and/or tax windfall profits…which seems to be darn near all of them.
Then she left and I came upstairs here and marked my mail-in ballot for Alex Padilla, which I would have done anyway.
She reminded me of a lady — and I don't think it was the same lady — who came to my door during the 2008 election. I know flashbacks are a thing of the past but let's have one now. It's October 25, 2008…
Last evening, I was napping — or rather, trying to nap — when I heard someone pounding on my door. Turned out, it was a McCain volunteer working the neighborhood, trying to convince folks to save the world from the inexperienced commie-terrorist on the ballot.
We have a simple policy here at Casa Evanier: We don't buy anything from or give any money to anyone who comes to the door that way. Ever. If you were going door-to-door handing out free hundred dollar bills, we'd slam said door in your face. Especially unwelcome are those who think a brief porch visit will prompt me to change my religion…and the McCain worker was perilously close to that category.
Still, she seemed like a nice, sincere person…nice enough that instead of scolding her for waking me up or mocking her for thinking she could possibly make one bit of difference, I talked to her for a few minutes. She admitted that California was a lost cause and even told me that she'd been ringing doorbells all day and didn't think she'd flipped one voter from blue to red. The few positive notes had come from other McCain backers thanking her and encouraging her…but also, she told me, declining to donate cash to a lost cause. I did say to her, "John McCain has written off this state. Don't you think it's about time you did, too?" (For some reason, possibly because I was still half-asleep, I forgot to tell her that I'd already voted. As bad as the odds of her convincing me seemed at the moment, they were actually worse.)
One of two things she said that made an impression on me came when she admitted her efforts wouldn't change the outcome but explained, "I just couldn't sit and do nothing." In other words, she was standing on my welcome mat, not so much for the nation's benefit as her own…and y'know, I could almost respect that. She's not going to swing California's 55 electoral votes over to the McCain column but she might make herself feel a little better for having tried. In a like situation, I think I'd feel like I was compounding the loss, adding a colossal waste of time (mine and others') to all the other bad things I believed to be occurring. But obviously, she and I do not see the world in much the same way.
The other lingering impression was not something she said so much as the urgency in her voice. She's scared…scared Obama might be a secret Muslim and/or radical who'll destroy America with a socialist agenda. (I said, "Yeah, he might even start partially nationalizing banks," but she didn't hear me or didn't get it.) On the one hand, I think the current McCain-Palin crusade to make people feel as she does is great — great because it isn't working. Every day, their campaign demonizes Obama by another notch and every day, another state that formerly seemed bright red moves to pink or even light blue. On the other hand, it's a shame to scare people like that. They panic, they get ulcers, they divide our country and spread apocalyptic visions of the future…and worst of all, they knock on my door and wake me up when I'm trying to sleep. That kind of thing — the waking-me-up part — has got to stop.
So my feelings about people who ring your doorbell and try to sell you a candidate, a religion or gardening services haven't changed. I wonder if that woman's feelings about Barack Obama ever changed. She was worried Barack Obama might destroy America and he was in office eight years and I think the country is still here.