On the way to Cleveland

Monday, October 20, 2008

Young voters registered yesterday – 8,866

Miles traveled today – 400 so far

8:03 pm – Between Bloomington and Cleveland

And we're back! We left Ohio for a week and a few days, but we just can't seem to stay away. Ohio and an election year go together like bacon and eggs, pork and beans, prosciutto and melon balls... pigs and... blankets?... I am saying they go together well. And I am really hankering for something with pork in it.

The Buckeye State has that vital combination of being a huge swing state and bordering on no fewer than three other big swing states (Michigan, Indiana, and Pennsylvania). Cleveland also has the Rock and Roll hall of fame, which fits pretty well with our whole motif.

The one and only downside of these repeat visits is that a person can run out of new things to write. If it wasn't obvious by the series of pig-based similes, I have reached such a point this afternoon. Here we are humming along I-70 past farms and foliage, past one of the great breadbaskets of our nation and towards one of the early cities of the expansion period of American history and I am pretty much running on empty in terms of anything to write about the place before we get there.

We have reached that point in a road trip where our daily routine no longer astonishes us. We get out of bed at whatever wretched hotel is housing us for the evening, meet in the lobby for straight-from-the-plastic-wrap danishes and ten-day-old hard-boiled eggs, then split into one of two vans or the bus. The highway between places is beginning to look the same and even some of the places have started to meld together in my memory.

It's not altogether dissimilar from what the national press corps feel covering a presidential campaign. The reporters get on the plane. They check the schedule to see where they are headed next. They get off and are herded into a press area for an event that looks awfully similar to the last event they saw. The candidate repeats his stump speech almost word for word. The reporters struggle to find something that distinguishes this speech from the last. And then they send a piece to their editors and hop on the plane to do it all over again.

I knew reporters on John Edwards' plane in 2004 who made chalk marks on the front wheel of the plane and then put $5 a piece into a cash pool. Whoever had the mark closest to the tarmac upon landing at the next stop won the pool. Finding the winner of the plane wheel roulette was the most exciting moment of most stops they made.

So thank god for rock stars and young people. As opposed to those campaign stops, we see new bands and locals at each stop. Tomorrow we are pledging voters at the Coldplay concert in Cincinnati after a daytime concert with Bow Wow. While the trips between these stops can get to be routine, the stops themselves always have something worth writing about.

--Nick Brown