1199SEIU Covers Ground for Obama
Nearly 50 delegates, MPOs and other activists from
1199SEIU United Healthcare East flew to Wisconsin and were on the ground, getting out the vote for that state's primary election one day after SEIU's Executive Board unanimously voted to endorse Senator Barack Obama. Two weeks later, the local had 200 more working in Ohio and Texas, and busloads of Massachusetts members canvassing in Rhode Island.
Michael Lyn
electrician, Long Island Jewish Hospital
It's not just people of color that are suffering. It just made me more enthusiastic about the cause of electing Obama.
retired from The Hebrew Hospital Home in the Bronx, after 31 years as a union activist and delegate. But she still answers when the union calls, she says.
"In Wisconsin there were 11 inches of snow on the ground when we got there and another seven fell while we were canvassing," she says. "People invited us into their homes, they gave us coffee." Smith says she appreciated people's hospitality and the chance to talk with them over those steaming cups of coffee.
Smith and her coworkers helped many Wisconsinites register and vote for the first time. Others were able to re-register or register and vote on the same day. "We encouraged people," she says. "A lot of people didn't even know they could vote….People are so excited. I saw it in Wisconsin and I saw it in Texas - blacks, Latinos, the young generation," says Smith of the Obama candidacy. "This is history. It's such an exciting time. I never thought I'd live to live to see it in my lifetime. Obama is going to change the face of our country."
Jean Marseille is a huge Obama supporter. The senator's message of hope and change really struck a cord with Marseille and led him travel to Columbus, Ohio to help with the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation.
Marseille, a nursing home worker at Roscommon on the Parkway in Boston, Massachusetts for the last 20 years, is not a stranger to hard work. But the work during GOTV was grueling, he says. "We knocked on thousands of doors. My purpose was to energize folks to the level I am. The days were long, and the weather was bad, but it was definitely worth it."
Marseille says the most memorable aspect of the work "would definitely be those folks who said they had never voted in their life; but Senator Obama motivated them to go out and register to vote."
"It has been for too long now that the world has looked at our nation with contempt," says
Michael Lyn, an electrician at New York's Long Island Jewish Hospital for 20 years. "I believe for our people, our nation and for the human race we need a leader of integrity and love - love that other nations can see."
Obama's message of change resonates so strongly with him that Lyn volunteered for eight days in Milwaukee, WI and Cincinnati, OH voter registration drives and GOTV operations.
An experienced political activist, Lyn first hand what eight years of the Bush administration have brought to the Cincinnati area while canvassing there. "I've never seen so many blocks upon blocks of nailed up homes before. I didn't know it was so bad," says Lyn. "It's not just people of color that are suffering. It just made me more enthusiastic about the cause of electing Obama."