It has been a long time since I had anything of value to add to this site but I think the following is quite interesting. I am a die hard liberal who worked on President Obama's campaign in Georgia in 2008. While our state did not quite go blue my county went 51% for Obama. Since then I have moved to Virginia and I became involved in the president's re-election campaign last spring. For the last 9 months we have made volunteer recruitment calls and done a lot of voter registration-nothing too exciting. But last week we got a new assignment-making persuasion calls. This is where we randomly call Virginia households and ask if they know who they will be supporting in 2012 and why. I was a little nervous at first-it is obviously a lot easier to talk to strong democrats and supporters of the president than random households. But after calling over 100 households personally and 300 as a group, I have a little insight into the GOP.
Generally we get 3 types of responses. The first is "Obama, of course!", which we love to hear and we got quite a few of those. The next fall into the "undecided" or "I don't know" category. Now as a flaming liberal I don't know how in the hell you can be undecided in this election but whatever. My favorite response is the "Not Obama!". This was funny the first time or two. But then I started to realize than not one republican had been FOR any of the republican candidates. I did not once get an "I love Newt" of "I am thinking about voting for Romney" or even "I am voting republican". Every single time it was "Not Obama" or even better "You can bet I ain't voting for him." This really shouldn't be a surprise. The republican Congress and Senate have managed to vote against everything this past year and really haven't been FOR anything in years. But I think my favorite was an elderly lady who said she wasn't supporting Obama and she didn't really know which of the other ones she liked so I asked what issue was really important to her? Her response totally blew me away-"Healthcare". So I asked what she meant and she said she relied on medicare. Rather than have a meltdown and scream at a poor old lady I told her to have a nice day and ranted to my co-volunteers. But I have decided that if "Not Obama" were to be put on the ballot or run as a candidate, that could very well win the republican nomination without a doubt. Which as a strong, liberal Democrat gives me hope for the 2012 elections! And by the way, I sent this story to Andrew Sullivan (he of the Newsweek story in the press the last 2 weeks) and actually got a response back. Too cool.