DORIS: Why I'm voting for Obama
PETERBOROUGH, NH (Nov. 3, 2008) — As the Straight Talk Express angles itself into a parking space alongside Town Hall, the recorded rally mix tape segues into another song. An anthem by Christian Indie rockers Switchfoot rolls out of the loudspeakers and splashes across the night sky.
Maybe I've been the problemMaybe I'm the one to blameBut even when I turn it off and blame myselfThe outcome feels the same
If it's going to happen, this is where John McCain will know it. Know it before anyone else, feel the electric charge of possibility as it builds and hums.
With some 36 hours to go before the first polls open here, McCain's come to New Hampshire because this is where he's felt it happen twice before. He came to New Hampshire — where he had twice defied all expectations, winning the 2000 and 2008 Republican state primaries — to see if he could summon the magic one more time. To Peterborough, where he held his final signature town hall meetings eight years and again 10 months ago, the final town hall meetings before GOP primary voters cast their upset ballots. He came with his lucky penny, found heads up by the publisher of the notoriously conservative Union Leader on the last morning of McCain's 2000 primary campaign, and he came with his lucky senator. For his part, Joe Lieberman came with his lucky red sweater.
With exceeding generosity, a police representative pegs the crowd at 2700 — 400 inside, the rest outside in a barricaded holding pen at the foot of the Town Hall stairs. Beyond the perimeter, cheerful Obama supporters wave their candidate's signs.The McCain camp has signs, too — oddly generic signs that no longer mention the name of the candidate or his running mate. Instead, they say simply "Country First," with the legend "GOP.com" in smaller letters underneath. Should the candidate vanish in a wisp of televised smoke on Wednesday morning, the signs can find new life across the Granite State at Veterans Day services and July Fourth parades.
Already vanished are many of the faces from McCain's two primary campaigns. Many prominent GOP figures are either sitting this one out, or have defected to the Obama campaign. But for every ten lost supporters, a new one joins the ranks.Forty-seven year old Johanne Duchesnes, a retirement community administrator from Dumbarton, has been busy annotating her sign with a magic marker. change we won’t regret it now proudly says.
"It's the fear of Obama . . . that got me out of my armchair," she explains. Although she supported McCain during the primary, she has never volunteered before. For the past couple of weeks she has joined some two dozen volunteers at McCain's state headquarters in Manchester, making calls to undecided votes. Just yesterday, she says, the campaign announced the 5000th call had been made, although she's not exactly sure what that means. Five thousand calls that day? That week? That month? She isn't certain, but knows it must be good.
Her 54-year old sister, Jackie Duscharme, who has been doing an enthusiastic sort of two-step as a hedge against the cold, explains why she feels it's so important to elect McCain. "It's the Democrats that got us into this. They're the ones who started into this economic downturn way back when.
I think George Bush's been dealt a bad hand," she concludes.
But it's really the war that's got Jackie concerned. "It's another Vietnam," she says. "We're the laughingstock of the world. We're going to have a reputation for going in there and going home, without winning."
But Duchesnes and Duscharme's John McCain is not the John McCain that electrified the Granite State in the winter of 2001. Just weeks later, in South Carolina, McCain was caught like a deer in the headlights as Karl Rove operatives questioned his patriotism, his mental health and the parentage of his daughter. Seeing it all slip away from him, the man of uncompromising principles capitulated, wrapping himself in the Confederate battle flag.
Later McCain explained why he refused to denounce the South Carolina's legitimization of the Confederate symbol. In what may well have been his final piece of straight talk, McCain confessed, "I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So I chose to compromise my principles." Like a kid who has been regularly tormented by a bully, McCain spent the next eight years trying to please George Bush.
John McCain will leave this place, declining to reveal what he now knows for certain. When he reached out his hands, did he feel the currents flow, or ebb?"Nothing is inevitable," he will insist, as he hopscotches like a madman from Florida to Indiana to Colorado. "We never hide from history. We make history."
But this is still the moment before. The door hisses open on the Straight Talk express. The loudspeaker calls out to him, calls out with the insistence of a heads up penny or a bright red sweater.
I've been thinking maybe I've been partly cloudy, it reminds him,Maybe I'm the chance of rainAnd maybe I'm overcastAnd maybe all my luck's washed down the drain FULL COVERAGE: www.thephoenix.com/election2008
--Margaret Doris
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