Open Thread

Election Day is tomorrow and young voters are poised to make history. We've been sharing stories from the Rock the Vote Road Trip; we've seen crowds of voters marching to the polls in Cleveland and the Beastie Boys lead get out the vote rallies in Richmond.

Now it's your turn. We want to hear from you.

Have you voted early? Are you voting tomorrow? What issue do you care about most? What kind of conversation will you strike up with other voters in line?

Share your stories (and photos and YouTube clips) by posting a comment here.

And remember, go out and vote tomorrow!

Three days until election night

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

4:54 p.m. CDT – "It's the most beautiful time in Minnesota... Right after that first frost we get a few weeks of just golden weather here," Garrison Keillor says on the radio and I know he's right because I am driving outside the theater where he is broadcasting.

I'm in St. Paul, Minnesota following the Rock the Vote bus... or in this case the absence of the bus because it's in the shop today. The weather here is golden. Sixty degrees outside and as pretty as you have any right to expect a place to be. At the University of Minnesota, where we were earlier today, the students were out in T-shirts and jeans and one poor refugee from last night's halloween celebrations was still wandering down Hennepin Avenue in a foam Tea Cup clutching a beer and bracing herself for the raging hangover headed her way.

I spent the afternoon calling young people along with a dozen other volunteers for Rock the Vote and the Minnesota Public Interest Research Group (MPIRG) in a process known as phone banking. Phone banking can be a nightmare. Four years ago, I worked for a candidate in the Iowa caucuses and spent twelve hours a day on the phone. I got ear bruises. My throat was always dry and I started to get sick. I learned to smile when you call a voter because they hear it in your voice, that affecting a southern accent makes people more friendly, and to make my pitch personal. It can be awful work. Sometimes you will hear a football game in the background when a voter picks up the phone and you know that he is going to tear you apart for interrupting. Sometimes you will hear someone yelling or a shower running or a car honking and you will know it's a bad time. Once I thought I heard a gunshot.

Right now each of the presidential campaigns have hundreds, maybe thousands, of callers phone banking swing voters. There are probably hundreds or maybe thousands more people calling from each of the tight congressional races. The closer we get to the election, the more people there are who are cursing the invention of the phone and signing up for the national do not call registry. At the end of the day, the only calls a person wants from a stranger are the ones telling him he has won a sweepstakes.

But people do respond to these calls and most of the people I called tolerated me for the thirty seconds I took to remind them to get out on election day. A few even had questions about what to bring to the polls (ID and utility bill is a good idea in most states) or where they could find their polling place (the election center on rockthevote.com has them if you enter your address). I made 150 phone calls before taking off to talk to the kids coming to tonight's concert.

5:50 p.m. CDT – "Free T-shirts," Aaron James, the bus tour DJ is yelling at strangers. It's like throwing a zebra to lions. Frenzy ensues. They have just opened the door at the Roy Wilkins center – where the Beastie Boys, Tenacious D, and Ben Harper will be playing tonight – and the line charges our table for two minutes before the traffic abruptly stops. The early crowd, the fans who want to be right up next to the stage are through and now we will hover here for a few more hours and wait for the people who are alright with standing in the second row.

6:30 p.m. CDT – A vendor has started yelling "Peanuts, pop, beer. Get them here." It rhymes. Free T-shirts is still a pretty powerful draw, but it's tough to compete with peanuts and beer, so a few of the new arrivals are drifting towards the other guy.

7:13 p.m. CDT – Sound check has begun, so I am off for the night.

Richmond, VA

Wednesday, October 28th, 2008

Miles traveled today – about 300 so far
Days until election night – 6

1:07 a.m. – Between Richmond and Youngstown

There are fifteen hundred young people in front of the stage: some are students at Virginia Commonwealth University and some just there because they heard rumors. The stage is a mere 9’ x 9’ platform elevated three-and-a-half feet above the ground. People twenty feet back are jumping in the air or piggy-backing on boyfriends to catch glimpses of the musicians. Earlier we had to yell at a few tree-climbers who were crouched in the bows of an Oak because the police threatened to break up the whole affair if they didn’t get down. Santogold announces Sheryl Crow and she and two of her guitarists climb onto the stage and plug in.

“It’s so great to see so many young faces out here,” she says, amplified as loud as our noise permit allows. “Faces who vote... Do you believe in hope?”

There is a massive cheer. It’s like asking if you believe in happiness. Of course we do. But the guitars have started, so it sounds profound and moving.

“Do believe your voices are going to make a difference in the future of this country?”

A louder cheer. Six hundred of these kids signed a voter pledge. They are primed. And then the song starts.

Today — or technically yesterday — was our second day with Sheryl Crow and the Beastie Boys, our last day with Santogold and our first and last day with Jack Johnson, who is – and I say this as a confident heterosexual male – a total dreamboat. If you doubt my judgement here, you need only ask one of the girls who spent his set screaming in the front row.

***

Meanwhile, the bus tour crew have not quite adjusted to dealing with celebrity. We wander between star struck and star dazzled on these recent stops. We fumble over basic phrases, tiptoe past the Beastie Boys secretly hoping they ask what we thought of Paul’s Boutique, and stand staring at a spot near-but-not-too-near to Sheryl Crow as she does nothing in particular. As one of our two Chads said “What? I’ve accepted they’re better than me. Now I just want a picture.”

Yesterday, one member of our crew drove the Beastie Boys to lunch. He sat outside the restaurant while they ate. But no one told him they already had a ride home from their manager so he just kept sitting in his parked van outside the restaurant. They are terribly famous individuals. We wouldn’t want to disturb their famous lunch. And our anonymous crew member assumed that maybe famous lunches take longer than everyday lunches. So he waited for three hours before we called to tell him that the band had left.

This is how our brains have deteriorated. Our basic logic functions are melted away by the presence of big musicians. So questions that would have seemed simple to us if we were in, say, a third grade math class leave us befuddled and gibbering.

But we are acclimatizing slowly. And it’s getting late. So I’ll end suddenly here.

--Nick Brown

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

Flobots and Des Moines

DSC_0031, originally uploaded by Rock the Vote 2008.

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Young voters registered yesterday – 10,595
Miles travelled today – 120 so far

9:20 pm – Between Des Moines and Iowa City

The Flobots - above - were with us tonight in Des Moines and we will have what they said in an online video in a couple of days. In the meantime, here’s today:


Des Moines, IA has the second largest skywalk in the United States. For those unfamiliar, a skywalk is a series of above ground passages leading from building to building. You use it to get around in the winter and to get terribly terribly lost at any time of year.

We were very good at getting lost. The goal of our afternoon was to walk around this massive above-ground passageway registering anyone we found. It worked. We registered lots of people. But finding our cars was completely impossible.

Or rather, finding them was fairly simple. Getting back to them was impossible. Our DJ, Aaron James, and I were in charge of retrieving one of the vans and we spotted it almost immediately from a glass corridor twenty feet above Locust street. If we could have jumped down we would might have landed on the van. But we couldn’t, so we had to wander through buildings until we found a street exit. Aaron was convinced he knew where he was going, which, of course, he didn’t. I was convinced he had no idea where he was going, which, of course, he didn’t.

The scene reminded me of my parents. I drove through this state many times with them when I was much younger. Both grew up here, so I came to associate Iowa with family legends and long fights about whether we are lost. These trips taught me a valuable lesson: if you are fighting about whether you are lost, then you are lost. And so it was today.

“Aaron, do you know where we are?”

“Yeah, I recognize this. We’re coming up on something.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s behind us. We ought to ask someone.”

“Let’s just keep going, I think I recognize this.”

“It won’t take a second to just stop at one of these stores.”

“Just trust me, alright.”

We were a twisted stereotype of husband and wife. But how could we not be? As of today we have been traveling for five weeks without time apart or rest. As a group, our choices were to develop into a hostile infighting mess or to bond into a family unit. So we now have eleven quasi-siblings and two rotating semi-parents. Tonight, I played Mom and Aaron was dad. Everyone else played the kids waiting for us to find the goddamned car.

“I’m pretty sure this is the wrong way.”

“Look, there’s no reason you shouldn’t trust me. I parked the car.”

“I’m just saying.”

After twists, turns, an emergency exit and a twenty-minute walk through the cold grey weather, we found the car. Aaron grudgingly admitted we had been lost and I mostly refrained from gloating. We picked up the kids, drove to a concert with the Flobots for some voter registration, and then hopped back on the bus to drive to the Iowa city. I am hoping we can stop on the way to see the world’s largest strawberry.

Pete Yorn Rocks the Vote

Pete wrote American Blues Vol. 1 on the 4th of July after reading the morning paper. He was moved by how much negativity he was reading about and how even groups were boycotting Independence Day because they were so disgusted with the state of our Nation. He sent the song to some friends and one of them (a really old friend of his who is actually a huge reason he didn't give up on a musical career back in 1998) was really affected by the message. His friend always has had an unwavering faith in America and has always been able to laugh when times got tough. So, he decided to make a video and at the end send a message for people to get out and vote.

Pete Yorn is joining Rock the Vote Road Trip tomorrow in Omaha.

-- Kelly Fogel

Between Milwaukee and Minneapolis

Saturday, October 11th, 2008

Young voters registered yesterday – 18,930
Miles travelled today – 336

2:37 pm – Somewhere between Milwaukee and Minneapolis

We have reached that point in the electoral process, I think, where you could not watch any TV station in the country for an hour without some mention of one or both of the presidential candidates. The news networks' standard riveting ticker headlines ("Chicago Club found haunted") now also carry mundane campaign updates ("Palin arrives in Missouri"). And it's hard to drive more than a mile or two of highway without seeing a yard sign for one candidate or another. We are, in short, in the all-encompassing season of the American campaign where politics cannot be ignored.

We saw this first hand at a refueling stop this afternoon. The bus pulled in at one of those truck-stops/megastores that speckle the interstates of Wisconsin and Minnesota: the kind of place where a single building contains a restaurant, slot machines, showers, bathrooms, a convenience store, and a 'souvenir shop' filled with porcelain lawn creatures and John Deere paraphernalia. We opened the bus door, prepared to dash inside to find something irresistibly tacky to buy, and were immediately assaulted by two teenagers and a band. The band, The Urgency, wanted to hand off a demo CD and the teenagers - one of whose eighteenth birthday was today - wanted to register to vote.

"We were at the McDonald's and we saw the bus and we wanted to get a picture and it's his birthday," the younger of the two teens said, in what was basically a single breath.

He explained how they sometimes see tour busses pass through when they are at the McDonald's and had seen Nelly's bus and Beyonce's bus and well, a bunch of other busses, and how it was worthwhile to run across and see who had come into town. This bus looked a lot better than the others though.

The band, meanwhile, pointed out that we used to work out with MTV and they had just done something with MTV and could they hand us a demo CD because, you know, you never know...

I had been napping for the hour before we stopped and the sudden rush of strangers and conversation was baffling to me, as if I had rolled out of bed to find myself on the floor of the New York stock exchange surrounded by heavily caffeinated traders screaming buy and sell.

The van, our satellite vehicle, stayed an hour behind us and its passengers were not subjected to this spontaneous outpouring of enthusiasm. Instead, they visited a hedgehog show in Milwaukee. A hedgehog show? you ask. Yes... I don't quite understand either. A quick googling confirms that such shows exist and are sanctioned by the International Hedgehog Association (IHA). Disappointingly, I didn't see the thing, so I am left to speculate.

But the mere absence of knowledge or personal experience has never dissuaded me from reporting, so I can say with conviction that the show took place in a dug out cave deep in the recesses of a network of tunnels under Milwaukee and was run by gnomes. The winning hedgehog was small, adorable, and sang a stirring rendition of 'God Bless America.' Miss Hedgehog Congeniality did a very nice public service announcement for us, but the tape was lost. Everyone was already registered and concerned with the candidates' stances on gardening.

They too are focused on the election.

--Nick Brown

Dayton, OH

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

Young voters registered yesterday - 27,862

Miles travelled today - 135 so far

3:37 pm – During the bad old days of the cold war, Soviet intellectuals hammered home a somewhat dubious claim. Freedom of speech, they argued, is not protected in the United States. How could they advance this perfidious rumor? Well, it was based around that most American of institutions, the shopping mall. The argument runs like this: because a shopping mall is the primary place of commerce and therefore the common meeting ground of US citizens and because it is privately owned, the owners of a mall can suppress any assembly, speech, or petition (very obscure pun intended) they don't like. So the "freedom of speech" in the US is a hollow facade that allows only the fat cats to say what they please.

Obviously, there are huge problems with this argument. The first and most obvious being that a mall is hardly the only - or even the primary - place that opinions are expressed and passed on.

But today it was hard not to feel a little sympathetic to the bad old Soviets. Today we got kicked out of the mall of Dayton for registering voters.

The mall has a no soliciting policy, with 'soliciting' defined broadly enough to include registering voters one day before the Ohio deadline, asking for nothing, giving out nothing, and generally maintaining a quiet, reserved presence. It was particularly frustrating because we were fairly successful. While there were no doubt cantankerous passersby who objected to a stranger approaching them with any question, however benign, most of the mall patrons were pleased to have us there, particularly the 14 or so we registered before being evicted.

I am tempted to write a long harangue on the importance of civic participation. But I'm not going to mention here that our nation is founded and maintained upon that principle. Nor will I suggest that the mall's policies literally embody Soviet criticisms of this country. I come here to bury my frustration, not to exacerbate it.

I will, however, suggest that if you read this and find it shameful that the highest-up people we were allowed to speak with kicked out a charity group whose sole purpose is to register voters one day before the registration deadline in Ohio, then you might express that opinion here: http://www.daytonmall.net/go/suggForm.cfm

Meanwhile, we are off to friendlier pastures outside an event with The Onion's, editors in Columbus this evening.

Carney at Toledo

Carney at Toledo, originally uploaded by Rock the Vote 2008.

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

Young voters registered yesterday - 40,629
Miles travelled today - 140 so far

7:23 pm - At some point today, Rock the Vote registered our 2 millionth voter. Last election, the total electorate consisted of 122 million voters, which means Rock the Vote has registered 1.6% of the total voters of 2004. This may not sound like much but it is a huge number. Applied selectively, 2 million voters could have flipped every swing state for one candidate or the other in 2004. 2 million voters is more than three congressional districts; there are fifteen states whose total population is less than 2 million; and - if they voted as a block - 2 million voters could easily be the difference in this election.

What I am saying is that I think a self-congratulatory pat on the back is in order.

Way to go us.

As for the day itself: we spent it at Toledo University, hosting a concert with Carney during the tailgates for tonight’s game against Ball State.

There are some October days, before the leaves have really fallen but after they have yellowed, when you can step outside and the air feels crisp and brings back a hundred memories of halloweens and thanksgivings and touch football games. On days like this you can find yourself staring off into nothing, caught off guard by the simple pleasure of breathing. The sun is brighter, the colors sharper, and sounds clearer than on other days, and however wrong your life may be an autumn afternoon can convince you that it will be OK.

Today was such a day and we spent the twilight hours tossing a football with the band before heading toward Columbus where we will spend two more days trying to register anyone we can get our hands on before the deadline Monday night.

--Nick Brown

Rhymefest at Wilberforce and University of Cincinnati

DSC_0279, originally uploaded by Rock the Vote 2008.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Young voters registered yesterday — 12,399
Miles travelled today — 103

9:36 pm - Some — in fact the bulk — of our hotels should go down in infamy as miserable slimy hovels fit for criminals or travelers from a prior century. Our production manager, Mary, has slept fully clothed for most of the tour because she fears what creatures may infest her bedding.

That said, the last two nights have been an exception. Whoever created or governs the Comfort Suites somewhere near the Buckeye’s stadium in Columbus, Ohio should be treated like a conquering general during a homecoming parade. Real comforters! Clean floors! Sure, the fitness center was a joke, but there was a pool! A pool! The front desk was manned by angels and I actually turned two years younger when I drank from the fountain in the lobby. So here’s some advice to the Columbus-bound: keep this place in mind.

In point of fact, Columbus as a whole treated us absurdly well. We hit Due Amici on Gay street (really) where we had one of the few excellent meals of this trip and then headed to the bars and clubs to impel the late-night drunkards to register.

After leaving the brief Eden of our Columbus hotel, we celebrated Sunday morning as one must: with a bullhorn, speakers, and half-wakened students.

Wilberforce University, the oldest private black university in the country, is situated well away from the hubbub and fury of the city. Large parts of the student body head home for the weekends and those who stay probably don’t expect to be roused by their classmates dashing through the hallways of the dorms screaming civic duty through a bullhorn at 10:00am in the morning.

“Students of Wilberforce. Wake up! You must vote for your future! Our ancestors died for this right!” Cyrus, a student at the school and a volunteer for Rock the Vote, bellowed at the walls. To some it must have seemed that they had flickered from one dream to another: maybe flying effortlessly over the hills of Kentucky and Ohio but and then violently wrenched into some surreal simulacrum of their dorm room. But in this new semi-dream, the dorm room is echoing with the sermons of some half-mad fire-and-brimstone preacher bellowing the gospel of participatory democracy. Have they flipped into a nightmare? Are the avenging demons of their ancestors haunting their dreams with guilt because they have not yet registered? Or is it merely that some nutjob volunteers are pounding on the door with promises of donuts, coffee, and music if they will just fill out some paperwork and vote?

Ah, they conclude as they come to their senses, it is the latter. And headed by that madman Cyrus.

Cyrus may well have had to deal with angry stares and sullen friends this afternoon, but he did pull out the students.

Rhymefest joined us for our stop at Wilberforce University and rode with us on the bus to the University of Cincinnati, a stop that included performances by ICandi and DJizzle and appearances from Miss America, Bootsy Collins, and Buckethead.

That show is now over and we have settled into our current hotel, which briefly looked like it might rival our paradise in Columbus. But it was not to be. My sister and I found our room filled with paint cans and construction equipment. The front desk exchanged it for a second room with mysterious stains on the floor and a doorknob that came off in my hand. Our brief Eden is gone and - whatever we did to deserve it - we must deal with the thorns and thistles of this new, lesser dwelling.

--Nick Brown

Downplay and Double Barrel at OSU

DSC_0158, originally uploaded by Rock the Vote 2008.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Young voters registered yesterday: 18,486
Miles travelled today: 161

10:27 pm Columbus, OH — Friday nights suck. Excuse the vulgarity, but I’ll stand by this position. They are the worm in your apple; the pad of butter you left in the pocket of your laundry; the rat turd in your bag of peanuts. If Friday night was kicked in the groin by the school bully and he collapsed to the floor moaning and rolling, you would know deep down that he deserved it. If Friday night were a president he would be Grover Cleveland. If he were a dictator: Stalin.

I know this is not a popular position. TGI Friday’s, for one, may object. ‘Friday Night Lights’ too. Also: anybody working five days a week in this country. But none of these people have had to starve themselves of sleep every Friday as they charge headlong from one late night event to a football tailgate at an unholy hour of the morning.

Last night the event in question was the televised presidential debate at the Hard Rock Cafe in Cleveland. The headlong charge: from Cleveland to Columbus, arriving at 2:15 am for a four hour nap before an early morning zombie-stumble to the car, coffee, and the Ohio State tailgate.

The good news is that we did good work. In three hours we registered 112 voters, hosted two concerts, and heard ‘Hang on Sloopy’ (the official song of both Ohio State University and the state of Ohio) at least four times.

Ohio State games pull a crowd. Today’s official figure was 105,175. We saw a good solid portion of them as Double Barrel and Downplay played in front of the bus and they are registering and interested. As anyone watching the 2004 election can attest, Ohio matters. With roughly 120,000 votes cast differently, the election would have run the other way. If this football game and the tailgate party around it wanted to, they could probably determine the next president of this country.

Of course we’re not the only ones who see this. Every major voter-registration organization in this country has its shock troops on the ground here trying to expand the electorate. On the more active campuses we have visited, it’s a surprise if we don’t run into some hyper-political student or non-profit employee registering voters... which is why we are taking the bus someplace more unusual this evening. Tonight we are in downtown Columbus standing outside a club and getting people ready for the election day. It will be a long night with little sleep, but there is some solace: it is not Friday.

-- Nick Brown

Pre-Debate Hawthorne Heights Performance at Kent State University

DSC_0062, originally uploaded by Rock the Vote 2008.

Friday, September 26th

Young voters registered yesterday: 19,441
Miles travelled today: 86 so far

7:14 pm - Somewhere between Kent and Cleveland - The debate is just around the corner and there is precious little time to write a thing before we arrive at the Hard Rock Cafe in Cleveland in order to watch. I’m predicting a blazing duel of charisma and policy that leaves both candidates winded and scarred. There’s too much nastiness on air for things not to get a little testy when the candidates meet in person.

We don’t get a lot of that hostile tension with the bus. This afternoon’s performances by Ben Taylor and Hawthorne Heights were pleasant and fairly mellow. When Taylor broke out his folk songs some of the students sat on the grass and leaned back on their hands. You could imagine it was an earlier era and we were sitting back in Northern California with flowers and good intentions. Fury and conflict are pretty foreign to this tour; most people pretty much agree that registering voters is a good thing.

Come to think of it, about the closest thing we have had to hostility came last night on the bus when we parked outside of Cleveland’s House of Blues. It went like this:

A grizzled old man dashed up onto the bus. He stepped uncomfortably close to me and demanded “Do you work here?” I watch movies, so fantasies of what happens next are not hard to come by. Maybe he is mad at our parking job. Perhaps he had an old grudge against one of the musicians whose pictures are printed on the bus walls. Maybe he has a gun. When I am alone, I imagine myself reacting like an action hero in these situations: a quick karate chop and this nefarious stranger is on the floor clutching his throat. In reality, I stand paralyzed.

“You work here?!” he asks again, stepping closer. There are two staffers in the entryway to the bus. We’re both over six feet in the prime of our youth. Maybe we are little out of shape but we are certainly physically prepared to defend our turf.

“... I take pictures,” I stutter. I am about as intimidating as Stuart Little.

“Who works here?” He demands again with a little forward jerk of his head. This man has tattoos. And a hat. And white, dry whiskers. He could probably eviscerate me with his thumb.

Kim - a 5’6”-tall perky midwestern redhead and our political director - steps forward.

“I work here,” she says. It is a glorious and heroic moment.

The stranger pauses. He stares her up and down. I tense up, prepared for sudden violence.

“I’d like to register to vote,” he says.

There is another long pause, as if someone had just announced to Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday, and the Clantons that thanks, but no the OK corral gunfight will not be necessary this afternoon.

Then, of course, things calm down completely and I feel like a buffoon.

If anything, I am feeling a little too accustomed to good will and good intentions. So tonight’s taste of presidential fisticuffs is probably good for us. I’m looking forward to it.

-- Nick Brown

The Bus in front of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

DSC_0016, originally uploaded by Rock the Vote 2008.

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Voters registered yesterday - 16,810
Miles travelled today - 32

6:45 pm - Somewhere in Cleveland - You travel with a group for a while and you learn things about them — sometimes even people you were already close to. My sister is on this tour and I have learned that somehow, perhaps by means of a small detonator in the direct geometric center of her duffle bag, she manages to spread her belongings around our hotel rooms in a pattern that can only be described as post-explosive.

Our current hotel room is splattered with various garments and I have found — along with the expected assortment of pants, blouses, skirts, sweatpants, shorts, socks, undergarments, T-shirts, and sweaters — several electric cables, a hairdryer, deodorant, a comb, two pens, a short novel, and various shoes. And this is just the surface layer. It is possible, nay likely, that underneath there are untold treasures. For all I know, a brief excavation could yield fossils of undiscovered dinosaurs. There is no knowing of course, since before such a dig can take place we are forced to leave the cluttered sanctuary of our hotel room and do actual work.

Today’s actual work involved Santogold and Low vs. Diamond at a concert at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Contrary to the name, Case Western is in eastern Ohio, but — when founded in 1826 — was in the western reserve of Connecticut. Of course, since then Connecticut has become an utterly meaningless player in our national elections while Ohio has become pretty much the winner-takes-all state for presidential elections.

Today’s actual work also involved a quick stop for a photo at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame here in Cleveland and a long late night ahead of us at the House of Blues. The bands who played this afternoon for free are playing for a slightly older, wealthier demographic for $30 and we will be spending a good long portion of the night seeking out anyone unregistered within that demographic.

Tomorrow finds us at Kent State with Hawthorne Heights and also finds my sister with the near impossible task of repacking her preposterous mess.

—Nick Brown

On the Way to Cleveland

DSC_0077, originally uploaded by Rock the Vote 2008.

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

Voters registered yesterday: 16,303
Miles driven today: 62

11:25 pm - As I'm writing this our economy is collapsing. And not some gentle fall-back-onto-your-pillow collapse. This is the real deal. A full-blown-house-of-cards-kicked-down-by-your-older-brother collapse. Lou Dobbs is frothing at the mouth ready to physically assault some poor congressman. He is one of the many on-air pundits trying to personify the subsurface rage of most of us feel. We are all too baffled by the details of who took what from whom and how to even begin to contemplate a solution.

Of course, the solution - or lack thereof - will determine the fate of us youths. When jobs start disappearing, those dreams of making it big start to look a lot less reasonable and the freshly-hatched college grads who are taking their first breath in the working world are as likely as not to end up stifled in some miserable minimum-wage grind.

And here comes the segue-- we spent the afternoon trying give those soon-to-be college grads a voice in their government. First stop: University of Akron, an undeniably beautiful school with a kangaroo mascot named Zippy. Zippy didn't put in an appearance, but several members of his constituency did. We registered 47 voters during the course of a quick concert by Bang Camaro and then picked up anchor and headed for Kent State University, where we will be hosting a concert on Friday headlined by Hawthorne Heights.

-- Nick Brown

Ms. America Rocks the Vote

I am so excited to be at my school, the University of Cincinnati, to help Rock the Vote get the word out to young people. Their voice needs to be heard-- especially in this year's election. As Miss America and as a fellow student, I feel that it is my responsibility to educate my peers on the importance of taking advantage of the nonpartisan information Rock the Vote provides, and using that information to make an informed decision when voting this November.

We need to realize that EVERY vote counts. We are a huge demographic and the candidates know that in order for them to win this election, they must reach out to us and tell us what changes they can make to better our futures. That's power!

This is one of the last weeks you can register to vote for the 2008 election. I encourage every one of you to make sure everyone you know over the age of 18 is registered, and that they come out to the polls on November 4th! Young voters have a chance to make history this year. Whatever party you decide to go with, just go out and ROCK THE VOTE!

-- Kirsten Haglund, 2008 Ms. America

Students at Boardman HS register for their first election

DSC_0055, originally uploaded by Rock the Vote 2008.

Bus Blog - Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

Miles travelled today: 109
Voters registered yesterday: 13,641

5:13 pm - Ohio! Land of tight elections, fish fries, and - for the first century of our republic - freedom from slavery.

In the present century it’s hard to argue that Ohio isn’t critical to any presidential hopeful and the advertising is out in force here. I have now been in our hotel room, an eerily sterile place, for fifteen minutes and seen three political advertisements. They are all vicious things suggesting one candidate or the other will destroy the country, set about armageddon, or otherwise severely muddle things up. You can leave a half-an-hour of TV fairly well convinced that the candidates are traitors, pederasts, or both.

Of course, I have worked with campaigns that tried to run clean and they tend to lose pretty badly. Americans may not like attack ads, but we do believe them.

We stopped at our first high school today, Boardman High School in Youngstown, Ohio. Outside the marching band and cheerleaders readied themselves to be bussed off to some distant football game while the nerds, goths, and stoners snickered in the hallways. For the first time, we ran into people who didn’t know their social security numbers. Job applications, credit checks, and utility bills have yet to hit these kids. This is the young end of the youth vote.

Ten minutes into our high-school visit, the hall monitor informed us that no one actually complied with the school’s dress code. “None of you have shaven,” he explained. “And you are using cell phones on school property. And that guy has cut off the bottom of his pants. And your jeans are ripped.”

A Navy representative had the table next to ours in the hallway and he sat smiling. He was clean-shaven and his pants were spotless.

He won the social victory, but it’s worth noting that our registration total (34 at the school) beat his.

--Nick Brown

Monday in Pittsburgh, PA

Monday, September 22nd

9:45 pm - Driving into Pittsburgh can throw a cynic for a loop. We think of this mountain city as an industrial wasteland driven by coal and steel. And it may well have been, but when you come through the tunnel and catch the sunset glinting off the bridges of the spired city below, you can't help but think of Oz or Atlantis. Unless you are Gary, our bus driver.

"I hate this city," he announced.

Gary's hatred comes from a long-ago football injury that some irate Pittsburgh Steeler inflicted on a Cincinnati quarterback. It's a grossly unfair way to judge an entire city, but after four hours in traffic on the randomly reconstructed streets of Pittsburgh, you have to sympathize a bit with Gary. While I did not keep an exact tally, it seems that we took somewhere between four and five hundred detours in a long and frustrating attempt to get back onto the highway before we finally moved through the city and reached our hotel.

Yesterday, we made two forays into the city itself: the first to the Pittsburgh Pirates home field to register the Sunday afternoon masses at PNC park and the second to host a concert at Pittsburgh University. The concert in question was headlined by local hip-hop artist (hip-hartist) Wiz Khalifa with performances from Trevor Menear, and Donora.

The concerts were lovely. And we did good work. Voters registered: check. Concert performed: check. But the real highlight of yesterday was the certain knowledge that today was a rest day. Today was a day of rest and we are thankful for it. Tomorrow we head for Akron.

Between State College and Pittsburgh

Saturday, September 20

Somewhere between State College, PA and Pittsburgh, PA

9:53 pm EDT - Fall means college football and Saturday
college football means something heretofore unimagined by me. Here's
the trick: some schools — not the one I attended and none of the ones
I have ever before visited — have a real sense of school spirit
anchored in football. Some of these schools, let us call a
hypothetical one 'Penn State' seem to regularly draw crowds larger
than several small cities.

We happened to be at this 'Penn State' this morning and while I don't
have the official attendance, I do know the average stadium attendance
last year was over 105,000 and that the stadium's capacity is the
largest in the country at 107,282 (Michigan used to be larger, but
it's capacity has been reduced due to an accessibility lawsuit). To
put this in perspective, Casper, Wyoming — the largest city in Wyoming
— is around 50,000 people. A capacity crowd at Beaver Stadium is
fourteen times the size of Wasila, Alaska; it's 40,000 people more
than you need to get onto a statewide ballot in Pennsylvania; it's
constitutes around one-fifth of a US congressional district. Today the
stadium had a capacity crowd and then some.

Max Kennedy, Robert Kennedy's son, joined us as we registered
students, alums, and the odd parent.

I am fairly certain the event was successful, though it's tinted in my
memory by the yellow light that comes from being right near the edge
of a dream. The bus finally arrived in State College, PA at 5:00 am
last night. We dropped it off in front of Beaver stadium and then
drove for an hour over mist-soaked backroads to our hotel. We arrived
at 6:30, slept enough for exhaustion to set in, and then pulled on
yesterday's clothes and trekked back to the massive stadium.
Adrenaline and Red Bull carried us through the first hours, but at a
certain point consciousness started seeming like a real burden. I have
photographs of two dancing pretzels in front of the bus, so I am
fairly sure that actually happened, but my hazy memories of
photographs taken, students stopping into the bus, and songs spun
split in and out with feverish images of misty roads, Pennsylvania
woodlands, and our briefly occupied hotel room.

Tomorrow we head to a Pirates game and then to University of
Pittsburgh for a concert and voter registration.

Nick Brown

Between Philadelphia and State College

Saturday, September 20

Somewhere between Philadelphia and State College, PA

1:34 am -- Today - or yesterday, technically - involved a return to
South Street with the bus in tow to register the early evening crowds.
They are a curious bunch, particularly this evening. For reasons never
made clear, we arrived as three-hundred howling and sputtering
motorcycles tore off into the night. These people are not your
parents' bikers. The heavily-bearded swastika-tattooed leather-clad
Hell's Angels riding chopped hogs are no longer the only riders
around. Nor are Harleys the dominant bikes. This crowd here is of a
different sort. Black leather is still the dominant motif, but some
few bikers wore greens, reds, and blues. Nor are the bikes the
stripped down American-made Harleys. Toyotas, Beemers, and other
foreign-born beauties streaked off South Street and down Fourth Avenue.

Our registration efforts were more or less successful. It must be a
refreshing surprise to be accosted on a Friday with someone who
doesn't want directions or a cigarette. Still, when that stranger is
asking where you live and what your social security number is, your
imagination might run wild.

Are these oddly uniformed 'Rock the Vote'
people members of some fiendish cult of identity theft? The bus adds
legitimacy, but only so much. The word on the street is trust no one
without serious credentials or dangerous weapons with any of your
vital numbers. We are a charming bunch though, so after some serious
eyelash batting we can usually get them registered or - worst case
scenario - direct them to the website.

We aborted our efforts around 10:30 after the GPS system delivered the
unwelcome news that State College, PA - our stop tomorrow - is a good
five hours from Philadelphia. We are a crack squad of professionals,
so our first move - vital to the success of any long ride - was to get
terribly lost. U-turns are not an option in the bus and Philadelphia
has designed the streets so that the shortest distance between points
A and B is frequently a wandering twist through one way streets. So we
are off to a rough start.

As I am writing this we are approaching 3 am, high on caffeine, and our
destination and sleep are still some ways off.

-- Nick Brown

Road Trip Stop-- Philadelphia, PA

Friday, September 19

2:03 pm EST - There is such a thing as being too close to a concert. The bass kicks in and you can feel the subwoofers shaking you to the marrow in a way that would have put the fear of God into people of an earlier time. These too close spots tend to be where the photographers are and while it makes for some great photos, when I am rocking back and forth in a catatonic state of shell shock in some old person's home many years from now, I'll trace the beginning of my decline to the artillery-like thudding of the stagefront at this past concert. Setting aside explosive sound-compression for a moment though, being close up gives a guy a chance to get some very solid photographs.

This concert, though technically not our kickoff, was our first major affair. Talib Kweli headlined the thing and Solange, Trevor Menear , and the James Gang. We also had Bobby Kennedy's son, Max Kennedy, and Joey Pants (the Sopranos), an actor who played a member of one of the organizations Bobby Kennedy spent his entire career trying to eradicate.

We funneled the crowd through a corridor of voter registration volunteers. Anyone who managed to stay unregistered throughout the concert must have had to make a real effort. Numbers wise, we have now registered hundreds of people on the bus and almost 87,000 online since this tour started.

In search of celebration afterwards, some select few of us hit Philadelphia's own South Street where the piercings per capita run at well over 5 and the late crowd draws in freaks, clowns, and a single Flavor Flav impersonator complete with Viking hat and timepiece. In all, not a bad way to end a day devoted to music and politics.

-- Nick Brown