Shopping for Votes in the Homeland

Yesterday I showed up in the Republican stronghold of Appleton, Wisconsin, to do my first ever round of door-to-door canvassing on behalf of a political candidate. Why I chose to drive 120 miles to walk from house to house in a steady drizzle of rain instead of doing it closer to home in my personal, progressive turf on the near-eastside of Madison is a combination of personal (my elderly, ailing parents live there) and political (there's a markedly smaller pool of Democratic volunteers there). How Republican is Appleton? Let me put it this way: Appleton is so deeply Republican, so truly Republican, that few there confess to actually being Republican. Here, in a small city that not only sounds like it's the Heartland/Homeland of America, but looks like it, too, independence, privacy and individualism are what is valued, and God above all. In other words, the perfect Petrie dish in which to drop a foreign body like myself. After all, it was this town that made me. I graduated from Appleton High School East in 1971 and fled the city limits just as soon as I could thereafter. That should be sufficient to confer a little immunity to me in this doorbell ringing business; I've already been inflicted with the local germs.

So there I was this Saturday, walking through the unrelenting rain with an armload of glossy flyers and a chest thrumming with anxiety. Why the anxiety? Well, the day before my 79-year-old mother had recounted how, when she told her bridge club I was coming up to canvass for Obama, the women had burst out giggling, "Well, I sure hope she doesn't come to my house!" Please bear in mind that these are old women who actually like me, for the most part, which means the white, middle class woman part of me, the part who likes her countertops clean and her shirts pressed, who keeps her shoes polished and her cup handles all facing the same way. Which is the part of me I'd been hoping to present up here to the good people of Appleton from the other side of their front doors, that most part, my presumed good part. But suddenly that part didn't feel adequate to the challenge of Appleton. To hear that even my mom's longtime bridge partners didn't want to see me through their screened doors increased my inbred apprehension about knocking on strangers' doors tenfold. I found myself wondering whether the pro-choice Obama sticker on my car was really such a good idea.

Frankly, I was nervous about this return to my own personal nightmare of a homeland. I mean, if I were asked to name the ugliest place I've ever been, I would name, without hesitation, Appleton. Despite its well-tended parks, despite its diligently swept streets and broad avenues, despite the neatly arranged pots of bright cerise geraniums and snappy red, white and blue banners bedecking porches painted right on schedule every five years to the day, Appleton manages to suck the soul out of the very concept of beauty. Lush gardens do not spill over walkways in Appleton; poets do not spill wisdom over the airways, and a sense of order can never fill the shoes of beauty, any more than Cinderella's stepsisters can cram their bunioned feet into her glass slipper. In the year since I renewed my Wisconsin residency, I've met several people who have told me that Appleton is a much more interesting and open community now than it was when I lived there, but it turns out all they really meant to say was that Appleton has a tapas restaurant now. Which, admittedly, is a good thing, for sure, but still somewhat woefully short of rendering Appleton "interesting and open."

It turned out my apprehensions were all for naught. No one was the least bit disturbed that an outside agitator was scouring these well-swept sidewalks looking for spare votes for Obama. Oh, not that homeowners welcomed me, not that I found the people on the other side of the door lintel open and receptive to political exchange and inquiry, not even that they turned out to be decent and friendly folk even if they did think they'd vote for McCain -- they just simply weren't home. On this cloudy, drizzly afternoon in mid-September, absolutely nobody was home except a few insane dogs who apparently found some kind of bizarre fulfillment in throwing themselves bodily at locked doors and ravaging the careful pleats of the tightly closed draperies.

What does everyone in a place like Appleton do on a Saturday afternoon when it's raining outside? After marking the last address on my soggy list NH (Not Home), I threw my clipboard into the backseat of my Civic and called it quits for the day. Driving by the big Fox River Mall on the way back to my parents' I did a doubletake; the parking lots around this indoor mall were full. Jammed. Like Christmas time in a good economy. Apparently, Appleton is the last place in the country where the middle class still feels secure enough to shop for a living and to work for the shopping. In Madison, the malls are fairly empty. The coffeeshops are full, but you could pretty much roll a bowling ball down most of the corridors of the city's malls and not hit anyone but the bored attendant at the sunglasses booth. But in Appleton, the middle class doesn't understand yet that they're an endangered specie; the parking lots are full of their Ford Explorers and Chrysler minivans, all idling.

My parents added another helpful bit of perspective. "Well, of course everyone's shopping!" they marvelled at my ignorance. "There's a Packer game on tomorrow afternoon after church!"

Oh yeah. The Packers. I think I'm going back to Madison before I learn anything else about the people I'm hoping will find something to appreciate about Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Hupp!