democratic party

Last Friday, the 22nd of August, I went over to the Fryeburg, Maine, office of the Oxford County Democrats and actually made 27 phone calls to people in the towns of Denmark, Lovell, and Sweden, Maine. This was between the hours of 2 and 4pm. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. I was assigned “seniors”, or over age 65 people, to call. I had some trouble hearing, especially when more callers arrived in the room, but mostly it wasn’t too bad.

This was mainly a voter survey with a detailed script for the caller to follow. Out of those 27 calls, I got into conversations with a mere four people. Most had their answering machines on and we didn’t leave messages then. Of the four people I chatted with, one was a strong Democrat, one a strong Republican, and two others kind of mixed. One of the “mixed” ones was hard for me to hear and I got into a too extended conversation with him I think. Two or three gave me outright refusals: “I don’t reveal my preferences over the phone.”, and one woman berated me for all those calls she’d been getting from Democrats. I found that strange because on the sheet supplied by the state Democratic party there’s a space for checking off “refused”. Are these voter sheets simply recycled afresh and the old ones stored away? Hope not.

Well, all told, my experience was tolerable but after thinking it over for a few days I decided not to go back for another session. And this after getting superlative pep talks at the Oxford County Democrats annual summer BBQ at beautiful Bryant Pond by the likes of Steve Rowe, Maine Attorney General, Cathy Newell, chair of the Oxford County Democrats, and Ben Tate, the youthful coordinator for the Obama Campaign in Maine. But hey, although I’m gung-ho in spirit, my body sometimes has trouble keeping pace. And anyway, what the hell, there’re plenty of other volunteers who could take my place, aren’t there?

I chanced upon an extended interview of Dennis Kucinich, including this great paragraph:

Kucinich: Well, Iowa is a couple of factors that came into play. The American people—I never looked at it as being about me—I mean the American people are entitled to the fullness of the debate. It’s not democratic to try and shut one point of view out. And since it’s very obvious to anyone watching that my point of view is profoundly different from any other point of view being offered inside the party, what they’re actually doing is unwittingly contributing to the destruction of the Democratic Party itself by saying that “these are the only points of view that we will deem acceptable within the Democratic Party.” And those points of view are generally reinforcing the corporate mentality inside the party. And that’s very destructive of the democracy. It actually contributes to the undermining of the hope for legitimate debate within a democratic society. And one of the major issues that I feel is somehow somewhat linked to what’s going on in Iowa, is the issue of health care. I’m the only one in this race who’s talked about the necessity of a single-payer, not-for-profit health-care system, Medicare for all. Now this plan would bring health care to those 46 million Americans who don’t have any health insurance and the tens of millions of American who are underinsured, who would no longer have to worry about their economic position being undermined by the insurance companies. Insurance companies make money by not providing health care—we all understand that. When you consider that half the bankruptcies in this country are linked directly to people not being able to pay their medical bills, when we consider that the bankruptcy laws were changed so that people would be locked into a sort of debtors’ prison for a good part of their lives, you come to understand the imperative of HR 676, the bill that I coauthored, as being the path toward economic self-sufficiency. Many homes in this country are finding that their budgets are totally undermined by their health-care costs. And so my solution is apart from any other candidates. It’s very interesting how little, despite a real effort, how little coverage the not-for-profit health-care system receives, how little coverage this proposal receives.

Of course, it means we’d all have to pay more taxes, a no no. Well, tough! We all here in America ought to pay more taxes, and if we bring the troops home NOW as Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson suggest, the taxes we’d have to pay would be far less.

Ha! Ha! How impractical can I get? Am I forgetting that Corporate America would not allow this? By gosh, I did forget that!