Fri 24 October 2008
Obama in Gary, part I
Obama Camp Sees Chance for Change in Gary by Chris Gray
Walter Ries walks south down Jefferson Street in Gary. The first three houses are vacant, then he finds a woman who is willing to both volunteer at Obama’s phone bank and sign up for absentee voting.
“You are the most cooperative voter I’ve talked to in days,” said Ries, who has been coming down from Hyde Park a few times a week since Labor Day to volunteer for Barack Obama.
“They will give you a call then.”
Her moderately well-kept lawn is shaded by a silver maple tree, but next door the house is clearly abandoned, with boarded-up windows and large cracks in the foundation.
Ries has to walk out in the street to get around it, as four-foot-high weeds and woody plants have consumed the sidewalk.
“Lots of doors to hit still,” Ries said, trying to move quickly along. The house numbers on his sheet of addresses are not always close together, but they are about the only houses occupied in the emptying neighborhood.
For the first time in decades, the state of Indiana has a contested presidential election.
This year, Indiana, that consistently Republican enclave in a Big Ten Conference of swing states, has a Democratic candidate willing to wager for a victory.
The search for victory in Indiana begins in Gary, just minutes away from the South Side of Chicago. If Obama’s campaign can reverse the city’s historically depressed voter turnout in general elections, it may just push the state into Obama’s column. DEEP RED TO BLUE
Most straw polls in the past few months have showed Republican John McCain in the lead statewide, but just barely. At least two Indiana polls have given the nod to Obama.
If he wins, he’d be the first Dem since LBJ in ’64 and only the third Democrat to take Indiana since 1900.
The Obama campaign is choosing for its chief sword, a skill Sarah Palin so denigrated in her speech at the GOP convention — the Saul Alinsky-style community organizing Obama learned on the streets of Chicago.
“It’s all about person-to-person contact,” said Obama’s Indiana communications director, Jonathan Swain. “That’s what was effective in the primary, and that’s what’s enabled us to get off the ground for the general election.”
Change has been the buzzword for Obama his entire adult life. In his autobiography, “Dreams from my Father,” Obama wrote expressively of his aching for a change in America:
“Change is the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That’s what I’ll do, I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For a change.”
His first stay in Chicago lasted from 1985 to 1987, when he worked as an idealistic 23-year-old, organizing the churches of the South Side and the tenants of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Altgeld Gardens project.
In building his organization for the Indiana campaign, Obama made 40 appearances in the primary. Showing that he’s serious about contesting the state in November, he has come back six times since then, including just this week, before he headed off to Hawaii to visit his ailing grandmother.
“We were able to capitalize not only on his organization in the primary, but Sen. Clinton’s,” said Swain, who had supported Hillary Clinton during the primaries and worked previously as Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh’s press secretary.
“The people here are not used to seeing presidential candidates,” said Swain. “They’re used to being written off and taken for granted by the Republicans. You’re seeing a tremendous amount of enthusiasm among Democrats in Indiana and among people who are getting involved in an election for the first time.”
ART OF CANVASSING
Ries, a Chicago State educator, and Chris Warren, who teaches at the University of Chicago, have each taken the South Shore Line down from 57th Street to Gary Metro several times since Labor Day. This campaign has been a first for Warren, although Ries helped volunteer in the Kerry campaign.
“I still remember being a big John Kerry supporter in 2004 — and I remember Obama’s speech in 2004, and thinking that this is really at the core of a lot of what it means to be an American,” Warren said. “This is someone who talks about citizenship and responsibility in a way that I could be a part of. Thinking back to his speech in 2004, it was inevitable that I be a part of this campaign now.”
If it rains, they work the phone bank. If not, they can knock door-to-door.
“I felt that it was terribly important to defeat Bush,” Ries said. But, “Obama, I think he’s running a strong campaign, and he’s basically a stronger candidate than Kerry ever was.”
Ries and Warren were assigned to the Horace Mann neighborhood, east of downtown Gary. It is a neighborhood where the city’s exodus most pronounced, where there are as many abandoned, derelict houses as not.
After its peak in the 1960 census at 178,000 people, Gary dropped to 102,000 in the 2000 census. By the 2006 estimate, it had fallen to 97,000.
After passing a couple more empty houses, Ries knocks on the door of Corene Wiggins, a 57-year-old housewife of a steel worker. She came to Gary from Jackson, Miss., in the 1960s.
“It’s a whole new setup in the South. It was terrible. It was bad back in the ‘60s,” Wiggins said. “I’d like to see a black man in the White House for a change. He might change the whole world.”
Outside the home of Leanna Dixon on Madison Street, her 4-year-old great-granddaughter, Deshras, rides her training-wheeled bicycle up and down the sidewalk, trying to glide over the broken-down parts.
Anyone over 65 can sign up to vote in absentee, so Ries signs Dixon up.
Across the street, Shirley Jackson helps with a rummage sale. Fur coats hang in a spruce tree and tables and chairs line the sidewalk, with four people minding the store.
“That’s what I have to do to make ends meet,” Jackson said.
“What I like most about him?” she said. “He’s a family man. He’s a very good father, and his wife is a very smart woman.”
“You want to know the truth? I like him because he’s partly black,” said Richard Bailey, sitting two chairs down and rolling a cigarette. “I don’t know — he might make a difference, especially for poor people. We already know the Republicans ain’t going do nothing about the poor people.”
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