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I went way off script on a doorstep today. [1]

['Blue Boomer', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Mark Sumner']

Date: 2026-09-12  

It being a Saturday morning, I donned my candidate T-shirt and VN veteran’s cap, attached my fully charged hearing aids, put two large electrolyte drinks in my car, and headed to the local Starbucks to receive my turf and walk cards for a neighborhood canvass. The miniVan is new, but I’ve been doing this with a clipboard and printed list since 1964, before I was eligible to vote. I hate phonebanking, but have always enjoyed knocking doors where I can see the person I’m talking to and maybe add some minor twists to the script based on what I see on the way to the door (pets or children’s toys in the yard, type of vehicle, etc.) And except for the heat, it’s stress fee. Nobody in Oklahoma gives a hard time to a pudgy senior citizen wearing a war veteran’s cap!

As for the heat, by playing it safe I can handle that too. I wrote a piece on my county Dems website titled, “An Octogenarian’s Guide to Canvassing in the Heat.” Maybe I’ll publish that here too, but the sensible precautions are pretty obvious if you give them some thought.

Anyhow, there were three of us at Starbucks. The organizer with the turfs and cards wanted to wait longer to see if anyone else showed up, but the temperature was rising and I wanted to get started. My assigned turf was Independents only in a poor part of town, about half of it public housing. And it proceeded pretty much as expected. Two wrong addresses. Many “nobody home/left literature”, although of course many of those were quite obviously at home and preferred not to answer the door. The conversations I had were all positive. I know I picked up at least a couple of votes. No new volunteers. One lady said she would have liked a lawn sign, but “the Authority doesn’t allow it.”

At the last house on my route, I went off script. It started normally enough. I asked the young man if he had heard of my candidate. He hadn’t. I handed him a walk card and ticked off some reasons to vote for him. In reply to my question on what issue mattered most to him, he said, “I don’t really follow politics closely enough to give an answer.” But he promised to read the literature.

Then he thanked me for my service, and that’s when – on the spur of the moment – I went off script. I said yes, I had served in Vietnam, as my country demanded, but I left over 58,000 of my brothers (and a few sisters) there, and half a million VIetnamese died too. And now we’re buddies with the very people I was sent there to keep out of power. Our big companies all invest in the cheap labor, and our government wants them on our side if we decide to fight China. Mr. Trump got himself elected promising to keep us out of wars like that, and now he’s started a new one with an even lamer excuse, and it’s driving up all your living costs. And he did it all on his own, without the consent of Congress. And our Congressman seems to think that’s okay. And that’s one of many reasons – perhaps the most important one – why this old veteran is out in the heat today, asking you to vote for a new guy who’ll say no to these forever wars. Those probably weren’t my exact words. After all I was way off script. But they were pretty close. And I think I got through to the guy. He was definitely listening.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/9/12/800097494/community/i-went-way-off-script-on-a-doorstep-today/

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