National health care day

Last Saturday Stephanie and I stopped by a couple of Southern Indiana Naitonal Health Care Day of Service activities that the Obama campaign's post-election campaign arm - Organizing for America - put together. You'll recall that the older daughter of Stephanie's school principal was helping organize one of the activities and so we showed up in Jeffersonville for a health care fair. There were lots of people running activities - health screening, kids' activities, healthy food - but not a lot of other people. The point of these activities seemed to be to give people a chance to connect with people on health care issues and to also mobilize support for the president's health care reform principles - you'll recall, choice of doctors and insurance including a public insurance option, lower health care costs, and health care access for all (particularly in a battleground state like Indiana). Seeing an insufficient need for volunteers, no Abby, and rising heat, we shifted to one of the New Albany activities: collecting healthy food at a farmers' market in downtown New Albany, complete a band. I split off for an hour and traipsed through New Albany and discovered it was hard to find anyone on a Saturday AM there and many people in the high traffic areas (in front of my friend Jamie's YMCA, at the library, at the post office, at the grocery store) were either not Obama supporters or were in a big hurry. During an hour I got a total of four signatures and it turns out that two of them were from non-IN residents - both at a fireworks store - whose signatures the volunteers didn't really want. Below are for volunteers - one of Stephanie's part-time colleagues, Abby, Stephanie, and a man linked wiht the farmers' market trying to revitalize the downtown.



Below are three of those folks and in blue one of the Organizing for America Southern IN big whigs and a woman in gray who it turns out - having lived in Europe for a long time - was pushing for a single-payer (national health care system), like what Senator Edwards had been pushing. Obama is of course not pushing this plan (even though the public option is a vestige of it). So this woman - with her own table - who I pushed her to join us for the picture - was sort of aligned against us. There are lots of legitimate reasons to support a national health care plan, and this woman seemed realistic that it is a long shot politically - she said she may be petition-driving at the farmers' market for the rest of her life. I felt bad that our activity was shunting aside this woman's activity somewhat. We did collect a lot of food and got more signatures at the Farmer's Market - I guess at all three sites they gathered a total of 150 signatures all day. A late afternoon blood drive was the other New Albany activity. The point is not just to demonstrate support for health care reform but to engage people and educate them about the issue and to get and update voter contact information to use later - and keep people in a somewhat mobilized state (even though like I mentioned before governing isn't as fun for people as getting elected and President Obama is slightly less popular than right before and after the election and definitely somewhat less so in Republican-leaning Floyd County (where he narrowly lost on election day) (unlike in neighboring Clark County, which he won). We'll see if I participate in follow-up activities this Saturday.



Stephanie's principal, Susie, stopped by and below are her two younger children. The whole family was on their way later to North Florida, where they would be staying at our own St. George Island in Franklin County.

Below is the band that was at the farmers' market.

Click on the frame below to watch and listen to the band playing the Stones cover "Not Fade Away."