While other bloggers may shy away from their favorite candidate, there is no hiding my amazing opportunity to work for McCain-Palin 2008 for the past two months. Living in DC, the political opportunities are endless! I think it almost comical that good friends of mine are having dinner with #3 in the country this week (Bush- #1, Cheney- #2, this guy-#3) or that one of the guys in JM and my small group is Secret Service. No, this is not to brag, this is simply what living in DC is like. Unlike other big cities that have their society pages, in DC you never know just how cool of a neighbor you could have.So back to working the campaign. I thought this would be one of those once in a lifetime opportunities where I could really jump in. Just finishing law school, sans job, sans kids- perfect! My friend Erica sent some emails for me which ended up with me in campaign headquarters one Monday morning. I was told there was a 25% chance would be working in legal, but that I needed to do my time on the volunteer floor making phone calls, etc. Well, my first day I was trained on the phone system and about to make my first call when I was approached by Lee, an attorney in Election Day Operations. So that 25% chance turned into a 100% surety in the first day.
My first order of business was recruiting lawyers to be deployed into battle ground states. This was no easy task. We called about 7,000 attorneys total and thankfully got a great team together. I balanced this with doing election law research so that the attorneys could be briefed when they arrived to these other states.
As the time at the campaign went by, I met the greatest people. It is a very cool experience to be with such a group of like-minded people working so hard to accomplish the same goal in very different ways. As the time went on, lots of people were deployed from headquarters into certain targeted states. I ended up working with three other women and in charge of half of our deploys. It was crazy to say the least! When you are receiving 100+ emails a day from type A personalities, just keeping on top of things was the most we could accomplish in a day. Thankfully we had wonderful volunteers that made life easier!
As election day grew near, I assumed I would be in town to work the DC National Response Center. However, I had volunteered to take video footage of voter fraud in Virginia. Overnight, that turned into me leading a Media Team for all of OH, and oh yea, I needed to leave today. So the weekend before election day, I flew into Columbus, OH and was there with the State Heads of OH, coordinating with the different counties to have media teams ready to go. On Monday, I drove up to Cleveland, OH and met up with the Heads of that county. We had great media people in Cleveland, so it was a pleasure to work with them.
On election day, I was ready to go in the car with my camera guy at 5:30am. Our footage was only ok, but later that say we got some amazing video of voter fraud and some serious violations (that even made AP jealous). By 10:30am, I could not believe we had been working for 5 hours and it was only the middle of the morning. The thing I enjoyed the most about the media team- PRESS PASSES!!!!! Those suckers are awesome! Forget rules or line or "no photography or videos." None of that applies when you are with the press! It is an all access pass to getting the footage you want! By 10:30pm, I finally had uploaded the last of the video footage and was absolutely exhausted. I stayed up in time to see McCain and Palin concede and fell asleep about half way through Obama's speech. Pulling four hours of sleep for the last week left me exhausted, but satisfied that I had given it my all.
So all in all, I am sad that McCain will not be my president for the next four years, but very happy that I was blessed with the opportunity to work for such a great man. I think the future holds lots of hopeful anticipation and I am curious to where God will lead us as a country.
