Volunteers dialing it in for Chelsea votes

Volume 2, Number 18 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | February 1 - 7, 2008

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Chelsea Now photos by Jefferson Siegel

At a phone bank in the downtown headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers, Linda Mayer of Chelsea makes the case for Hillary Clinton to UFT retirees across New York.

Volunteers dialing it in for Chelsea votes

By Chris Lombardi

With New York’s Feb. 5 presidential primary approaching next week, two groups of Chelsea residents with the same goal—but vastly different ideas of how to reach it—manned volunteer phone banks on Monday to push for their respective Democratic candidates.

The volunteer callers, placing a special focus on Chelsea and Clinton, separately shilled for Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with distinct styles and strategies.

For Hillary Clinton, a phone bank of retired New York City teachers headed by Community Board 4 member Millie Glaberman methodically reminded the union’s 55,000 retirees of their candidate’s long past and her husband’s strong history with their union.

For Barack Obama, a handful of creative professionals clustered in a West Chelsea office staring at computer screens, asking local supporters to help build the campaign, and hoping their efforts would, as one volunteer said, eventually “get the U.S. out of a dark place.”

Both, however, were calling one aim in mind: to get enough votes to secure some of New York’s 232 delegates for the Democratic National Convention. Unlike the Republican Party’s winner-take all system, most of the Democratic delegates are allocated by congressional district, including six for Chelsea.

Obamarama, five friends at a time

On Monday night, Obama volunteers inside the 25th St. office of Furnace Media confined their calls to District 8.“To get three of those delegates, we need 42 percent of the vote,” said Furnace president Ethan Vogt, as volunteers crowded into his company’s two-room office.

“The campaign is not advertising heavily in New York because it’s very expensive—and its Hillary’s home state,” he said. “But because it’s not winner-take-all, every vote counts.”

Vogt and graduate student Anika Binnendijk convened the Chelsea group a few weeks ago using a decidedly 21st-century approach: “We started out with our personal e-mail lists, and built from there,” Binnendijk said Monday. They also posted an announcement on the popular social-networking Website Facebook for a “party + mixer” entitled “NYC Obamarama - Because America deserves audacity.” Among the stated incentives to attend were, “To hang out with other hip, idealistic young people.”

On Monday, seven volunteers showed up, calling voter lists displayed on their laptops or on Furnace’s larger computers. All asked, just as on Facebook or MySpace, “Do you have five friends who might want to get involved?” And every person who agreed to volunteer received an immediate, personal e-mail from the caller.

“Say first that you’re a neighbor,” Vogt told each volunteer, “so they don’t think you’re from a call center in the Midwest or something.”

55,000 old friends

At first glance, the casual viewer might mistake the room at 25 Broadway for just such a call center, with its rows of telephones and steady stream of paperwork. But instead of computer-generated numbers, the callers at the United Federation of Teachers’ downtown headquarters had only sheets of paper filled with lists—and very good memories.

“I just told a teacher I’ve been in the union for 56 years,” said Abe Levine, who sat Monday at the back of the room, his suit well pressed and a light blue tie matching his eyes. “She didn’t believe I was actually speaking to her on the phone,” he added.

Levine, the former head of the UFT’s elementary-school teachers’ section, told Chelsea Now that he remembers the federation’s very first endorsement: Lyndon Baines Johnson, in 1964. Now active in the political action committee of the union’s retiree division, Levine has gotten on the phone every morning for the last three weeks, according to the division’s political director, Millie Glaberman. “He gets here at 9:30 in the morning, and he stays quite late,” said Glaberman, who is also an active member of Board 4.

Glaberman’s team, which has worked 24 hours a week for the past three weeks, is part if a 24-7 UFT operation—one of scores of phone banks deployed for the Clinton campaign statewide. Their goal: reach all 55,000 retirees, one Congressional district at a time. “Today we’re calling Long Island, but we’ve called all over,” added Glaberman. “We’ve called Staten Island, we’ve called Jerry Nadler’s district,” District 8, which the Obama campaign is counting on.

“I tell them that Hillary Clinton is 100 percent with us on all our issues,” Levine said. “I tell them that she’s been a friend of the UFT for many years, back to [previous union president] Sandy Feldman.”

That history was on the lips of many of the retired teachers Monday, dating all the way back to 1992. Glaberman told Chelsea Now that she was impressed then when she watched all the Democratic candidates show up at a union gathering at the St. Regis Hotel. “Bill Clinton was the only one who looked into my eyes, and answered my questions very specifically,” she said. “I went back and told the UFT that I wanted to run as a delegate for Clinton—back when no one had ever heard of him!”

Over the years, Glaberman added, she found Hillary Clinton “just as brilliant,” if not more so. “And very warm,” she said.

As they speak to retirees, Glaberman said, they emphasize issues central to seniors. “[Hillary’s] the most experienced without a doubt. We’re very concerned about maintaining Medicare, and not privatizing Social Security.” Much of the time, she said, they find themselves working to assuage voters’ concerns about Clinton’s proposals for universal health care. “Many of them have health plans they like and doctors they like. I tell them—they can have all that.”

All spoke of the personal relationship between Clinton and the UFT, including a call two weeks ago to the retirees’ delegate assembly. “There were 1,000 people there, and her voice coming through, thanking us profusely for our support, and then going on to say that she wanted to scrap ‘No Child Left Behind,’ ” Levine said.

Fellow UFT caller Amy Maier, who lives in London Terrace on West 28th St., added, “As a woman of a certain age, I’m excited that a woman is about to break the glass ceiling.”

When asked about challenger Barack Obama, Glaberman sighed. “He keeps talking about change. Change can be very good, but it can be very bad. He sounds good, but we don’t know what he stands for!”

Out of a dark place

That night, the West Chelsea Obama team did feel that they knew what their man stood for—and why his freshness appealed to them. Vogt said that he had decided to become involved because “I found the fact that two families have been trading the White House for 20 years kind of depressing.” The rest spoke of their candidate, and their campaign, in terms simultaneously more cerebral and more emotional than the practical UFT team.

“It’s such a crucial week; I felt like every spare minute I have this week should go to helping Barack make it,” said Marie Glancy, who teaches journalism to high school students at Youth Communications on West 29th Street. Glancy, who said she has been supporting Obama since his 2004 address to that year’s Democratic convention, added her two cents about Hillary Clinton: “She’s a hard worker, but too often she’ s put the finger to the wind before she takes a position. I don’t think she shows a lot of political courage.”

Matthew Smith, an Australian freelance writer living in Park Slope, had a more specific reason for supporting Obama. “I’ve been in this country for a couple of years now,” he said, “and I think Barack has the kind of pragmatism that it will take to get the U. S. out of a bit of a dark place in its foreign relations. He has a way of being more open to options and beliefs among other cultures and other ways of being.”

Foreign-policy concerns were similarly important to team leader Binnendijk, a PhD student at Tufts’ Fletcher School of International Diplomacy. She started in New Hampshire, she said, where Obama’s loss to Hillary Clinton taught her “you can’t ride the wave. You always have to be working toward your next goal.” In New York, that means more than 10 phone banks in addition to the 25th Street location, as well as other events “with a lot more diversity.”

Between now and Tuesday, both teams visited by Chelsea Now will continue calling—confident that their efforts will pay off.

“I think it’ll be close,” said Binnendijk. “People who are excited about Barack just want to share it. That’s why it keeps growing.”

To the Clinton phone bank, the relentless persistence of thousands of UFT members can only have one result: “I think she’ll win the nomination,” Abe Levine grinned. “And the election.”