I had to take a day off today from my get-out-the-vote
efforts at the local Hillary Clinton campaign office. A long string of days
spent volunteering in a sometimes too-hot, sometimes overly-air-conditioned
space filled with people coughing and sneezing into phones and onto computer
keyboards seems to have caught up with me, and I’m fighting off a cold with decongestants,
vitamin C and lots of juice.
But more than needing the physical R&R, what I really
needed was a break from the response Hillary’s volunteers now receive nearly
every time we interact with a voter who’s decided to support Donald Trump.
I thought doing voter ID work was difficult back in spring
2008, when we California Democrats helped Barack Obama’s national campaign by
calling voters in states where primaries were still taking place. My worst call
that year occurred the day before Easter, while calling Pennsylvania voters. As
soon as the first words were out of my mouth – “Hi, I’m Marcy, a volunteer for
Barack Obama…” – the rural Pennsylvanian I’d dialed launched his invective: “I
wouldn’t vote for that nappy-headed n----- if he were the only one
running…” before slamming down the receiver.
Campaign volunteers are told to never call someone like that
back. But, sensing that he’d let my follow-up call go to voice mail, I did –
and left him a message that Barack would be in church the next day and would be
praying for him, because I knew he would be appalled by such a hate-filled
statement. I then opined that the voter’s own mother might be embarrassed to
hear her son say such terrible things, before saying “Happy Easter” and hanging
up.
The difference between 2008 and 2016 became clear to me over
the past few days, when Trump supporters grew distinctly more unpleasant,
hostile and crude as one day led into the next. While those who heatedly
opposed Barack Obama’s candidacy back in 2008 would generally target their
invective toward him, those who support Trump aren’t just unleashing their
venom on Hillary: they’re also assailing those of us exercising our democratic
rights by working to elect the candidate of our choice.
I can’t repeat the words I’ve been called. But if you think
of the most disgusting things someone can call another human being, you know what
I’ve been told. Even when texting voters an innocuous message from the local
Democratic Party that encourages them to vote and gives them a link to the
address of their local polling place, I’ve received text responses – from men
and women alike – delivering sexist, racist, anti-Semitic or misogynistic
slurs, or calling me moron, idiot, traitor or worse. One young woman informed
me that “Dems suck the big one,” and a middle-aged man requested a photo of me
in the nude. Those were two of the nicer replies.
And with the polls still close but remaining firmly in the
“Hillary will win” camp, those responses seem to be getting worse by the
nanosecond.
I can only imagine what my fellow volunteers started hearing
this afternoon, after the announcement by FBI Director James Comey that his staff
has determined there is nothing new to be found in the emails on Huma Abedin’s
computer – a finding that put Hillary Clinton’s email “scandal” to rest once
and for all. (Except in the mind of Donald Trump, who continued arguing on the
campaign trail today that she is “guilty” nonetheless and the system “rigged,” to
the rabid chants of “lock her up” from his supporters.)
No one deserves to be treated this way, just because we
support one candidate and the person we’re talking to supports another. But, as
one of my Twitter pals posted this afternoon, “The nation feels like they’ve
been sexually assaulted by Trump.”
And the ill will seems to have spilled over into what used
to be non-partisan venues. As a member of a UCLA football Facebook group, I
read yesterday of the experience two of our group members – both Hispanic – had
this season when they upgraded their seats and found themselves sitting in
front of two older Anglo men. At the first home game, those men started
interrogating the two Hispanics: where had they been born, where do they live
now, where had their parents come from, when did they get here, before
“testing” them by asking them – in Spanish – “where are you from?” The two
Hispanic gentlemen contacted the UCLA ticket office after that game, asking to
move their seats, to be told that the two older men had complained about them
and had already been informed, no we are not going to move the two Hispanic
gentlemen – we’ll be changing your seats instead.
That should never have happened in the first place. And I
blame the GOP presidential candidate that it did. Yes, some people are bigots –
and have been their entire lives – Trump didn’t create their bigotry. But he
fed it, and legitimized it, and made bigots feel that they are entitled to act
upon it. To put it simply: it’s been decades since I’ve seen people act on
their bigotry, so eagerly and so publicly, as I have this year.
Donald Trump’s campaign has been terribly destructive: it
has torn at the very fabric of the American family. If we’re going to restore
the sense of community, and unity, that so many of us have felt in past years,
we’re going to have to mend what Trump has torn apart.
I don’t know where we begin. But I’m starting to think it
will have to come from politicians emeriti of both political parties – perhaps
a partnership among former Presidents Carter, Bush the elder, Clinton, Bush the
younger and the newly-former President Obama, with support from respected
members of their administrations.
These leaders must find a way to tell GOP members of
Congress that their eight-year-long pattern of “just saying no” to anything and
everything proposed by a Democratic President must end.
They must be told that the very notion of obstructing a
duly-elected President’s Supreme Court nominees for four or eight years, just
because she’s a member of the opposing political party cannot be entertained in
our democracy.
And they must be shamed into acknowledging the damage they
are doing to the political process, and to the American people’s trust in our
government, by focusing only on an unending series of sham investigations
ginned up to bring down a political opponent, and an unending series of votes
to overturn, rather than improve, a law simply because it was proposed by a
Democratic president.
It is time for GOP members of Congress to start doing their
jobs again: to be the LOYAL opposition, actively representing their
constituents’ interests and political philosophy, while responsibly
collaborating and compromising with their Democratic opponents to find middle-ground
legislative solutions to problems that plague us all.
The obstruction must end.
So must the name calling, fear mongering, and hate spewing,
all of which are utterly uncalled for, simply inappropriate, and absolutely
un-American.
As Bill Clinton remarked after a protester shouted “You’re a
rapist!” during a recent rally for his wife, “I’m tired of all this acid being
poured down people’s throat. In the end, we all gotta get up in the morning. I
want you to think about this, and talk to people like that fellow who screamed
at me. If somebody says something hateful to you, tell them, ‘Unlike you, we
actually want you to be part of our future.’ “
I’m confident that our former Presidents are up to the task –
and willing to take it on.
Messrs. Carter, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama: we await your
response.
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