Day on the Hustings

Today was an interesting day with a couple of satisfying activities. In the morning I met five students from our Democratic Club at my office to take them out for some precinct walking. In the evening I attended a conservative-liberal debate on campus hosted by Valley Public Radio personality Terry Phillips. I'll write about my morning with the students.

The five students showed up at 9 AM and we set out shortly thereafter. Patrick and Philip could only stay for two hours, so Patrick brought his car and followed me. Nathan, Isabel and Tony went with me. We were out to place door hangers for our Faculty Union-endorsed Board of Trustees incumbent Earl Mann and for our Community College Bond issue, Measure I.

Earl's district, Ward 3, is largely rural in a largely rural county. It starts on the northern fringes of Tulare County's main city, Visalia, and proceeds mostly north and northeast from there. He hails from the town of Woodlake, himself. Earl had asked us to go to the areas on the northwest outskirts of Visalia where most of the new housing is. His idea is that new residents are the ones most likely to be unfamiliar with his long record of service in the community.

The students were terrifically diligent workers, efficiently moving up and down both sides of the streets in systematic fashion. They intrepidly climbed up and down one set of stairs after another at apartment buildings. I followed and picked them up at the ends of streets, leapfrogging teams ahead to maintain efficiency. At times I worried about losing track of where people were, but we didn't lose anybody!

We saw a handful of signs stuck in the ground for one of Earl's two opponents, Ruben Macareno, but nothing from Carmita Rodriguez-Pena, his other challenger. This being the Central Valley, we saw a lot more McCain-Palin signs than Obama-Biden ones. Still, that was no problem for our efforts. Earl is a moderate Republican himself, a good friend of education. By the time we called it a day and I took the young people to Burger King they had placed about 750 sets of Earl hangers and Yes On I flyers. We have six students signed up to continue the effort on Sunday. It was a good day, and especially gratifying to be associated with committed young people at work in the best tradition of grassroots democracy.