The Illinois GOP

So I showed up at Lake County GOP headquarters in Libertyville at 6:30 yesterday morning. No one was there. I went to Starbucks for my free coffee and came back around 7, at which time the lone staffer was there to unlock the door. No one else was there. (One other person showed up 10 minutes or so later). I said, "put me to work." They had me drive around to various polling places to make sure the McCain and Greenberg signs hadn't been taken down. Okay, fine.

I get back to to headquarters about 11:00am, and in addition to a few old guys standing around doing nothing, there were maybe 4 or 5 people in the back calling voters using their own cell phones. (When I volunteered in 2004, not only were there people out the yingyang, but there was a bank of dedicated land lines for making calls.) Not having a cell phone on me, I was asked to drive over to a Kirk campaign location in Vernon Hills to help them out (I later learned that the few people making calls at GOP headquarters were actually Kirk volunteers). The Kirk campaign call center had more people than they knew what to do with. However, I was able to make myself useful by driving a sweet, 93-year-old lady to the polls. I asked the Kirk staffer who gave me the assignment if I should talk to her about voting GOP. He basically said nah, she's already for Kirk and the other races don't matter. This stunned me, but I didn't say anything else about it.

When I got back to the Kirk call center around 1 pm, they debated sending me to another call center in Northbook, but that location too was fully stocked with volunteers and in fact, idle helpers were being sent back to the Vernon Hills location. So I told the Kirk staffer that I was going to go back to GOP headquarters to see if I could be of further assistance.

Upon arrival back in Libertyville I took the office's sole available landline and sat down to make some calls. Upon reading the script, I realized that headquarters also was exclusively focusing on Congressman Mark Kirk. The script didn't contain any exhortation to get out and vote for McCain, or for Steve Greenberg, the challenger in my district. No, in addition to having a number of his own dedicated call centers, Congressmen Kirk also had GOP headquarters making calls exclusively for him.

So, I sat there and "got out the vote" for Kirk until about 5pm. I'm glad that Kirk maintained his crucial Congressional seat. But why was there no effort focused on any other Congressional district? Greenberg, apparently, was expected to go it alone. So it seems was Sauerberg, who was running to unseat Dick Durbin. Why was I the only volunteer on the premises when the office opened? What were those guys standing about doing nothing actually doing? Why was there no phone bank, why were we not exhorting voters to vote for McCain/Palin? I don't get it. There's no Lake County GOP blog, no electronic campaign, no nothing. What I sensed was serious disorganization and serious defeatism in this party.