Local Obama Volunteers Gather for SOTU

At Chestnut Hill’s last night, an amalgamation of folks whose feelings about the president are—if the most recent Gallup polls are to believed—inching closer to the mainstream, gathered to watch him deliver his fourth State of the Union address and sharpen plans to get him four more.

"He’s just different, I can identify with him," said Dawn Carter, a volunteer with the East Mt. Airy/West Oak Lane Obama reelection team, over a pre-address meal of pasta and alfredo sauce. "I support him."

Carter, along with her husband Clarence and 23 other volunteers, will spend the next nine-odd months registering, then arguing, begging, pleading, flattering and cajoling prospective voters into giving her country’s first black president a second term. Project number one for the team is collecting the 2,000 signatures Obama will need to appear on the ballot in Philadelphia in November.

Considering he got 575,000 votes in the city in 2008, the team views this mark as attainable.

"He makes you feel like he is one of you," interjected Angela Harrison, Carter’s fellow activist and dining companion, barely audible over the bass heavy performance of a jazz fusion band that played on a makeshift stage 30 feet away.

("We’ve got no tea party people, no tea…no tea baggers here," said the band’s lead singer between numbers, showing, if nothing else, a performer’s knack for gauging the mood of a room.)

"He’s gonna bring the best to the table," added Harrison.

Arlene Edmonds, a reporter with the Philadelphia Tribune and an adjunct English professor at St. Joeseph’s University, is Harrison’s team leader. This is her first campaign as a member of the Obama volunteer team.

"The reason I got involved is I saw the results of the 2010 election," she said, referring to Republican takeover of the House and advance in the Senate that was widely viewed as a repudiation of the president.

There is also a more personal driver of her political involvement. Her daughter—27 years old, unemployed and with four children—just moved back home under financial pressures Edmonds thinks are only exacerbated by Republican policies. And when Edmonds herself was under her parent's roof, the Temple grad's father supported the family working as a medical technologist for New York University: a job he got and kept—in an era of overt racism—only because of the activism of unions she now sees as under attack.

"It’s about justice, fairness, ensuring people get living wages," she said, enumerating the aspects of the Democratic platform that animate her sufficiently to knock on stranger's doors in winter months.

Arnold Hall is equally animated by the issues, though speaking to him you get the sense it doesn’t take much. The wiry and mustachioed retiree of Philadelphia Electric and great-grandfather has a long track record of activism—"I started with King down in Alabama," he told a reporter—and sees Obama as the standard bearer of a proud tradition.

"We’re going to take it to the next level," he said, referring both to the president and the West Oak Lane team’s effort to keep him in power.

"He’s one of those exceptional, well-educated, black men who can deliver," added Cynthia Cranshaw, Edmonds co-team leader. The travel agent whose Jamaican roots are betrayed by her still thick accent, is, even among an Obama-sympathetic crowd, a particularly staunch support of the president.

"He knows his stuff. He's a role model," she gushed.

At 9 p.m. the conversation stopped. The band cut out, the grille quieted, and Cranshaw, Edmonds, Hall, Harrison, both Carters, and a room of like-minded company watched their president address three branches of government and the frustrated nation they represent.

Same time next year?