Want to wreck Obama's Walk for Change this Saturday?

[Matthias Corvinus]

http://www.barackobama.com/images/0609/WalkforChangeGuide.pdf
If there is a Walk for Change event in your neighborhood, you can expect pairs of Obama volunteers to show up between 10:00 and 21:00.

Don’t knock before 10am or after 9pm.

If you are lucky, they will arrive first thing in the morning. If you are unlucky, you will be the last person on the list. The reason I say this is that, if you are the first person they talk to, you will also be the last if you interact with them politely and effectively--which means an entire neighborhood will go uncanvassed. On the other hand, if they have collected pledges from people, they may be sufficiently disgusted to go back to the people they visited and return them. Here is how it works.

If you want a woman to dump a man, you don't do it by yelling at her or calling her names. You do it by telling her, as gently as possible, that he didn't bother telling her he had AIDS before he slept with her. If she gets angry enough, she will tell everyone he has AIDS and no one will sleep with him. Similarly, if the Walk for Change volunteers get angry enough, they may tell others how Obama consorts with racists and anti-Semites like Al Sharpton, and hate groups like Sharpton's National Action Network.

Needless to say, she won't believe you if you just tell her her boyfriend has AIDS (especially if she knows you dislike him); you have to prove it to her, or give her information to let her prove it to herself (even better). It will be easy enough for the Walk for Change volunteers to do a Google search and see that everything you are telling them about Obama's friends Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, MoveOn.org, and Allan Houston is true. Be sure to make this clear when you talk to them. Tell them that you don't expect them to take your word for it, and that they shouldn't take your word for it, but they should Google on combinations like "Al Sharpton" and "Freddy's Fashion Mart" (the Jewish-owned store his follower burned in 1995, while killing seven people), "Al Sharpton" and "Crown Heights riots," "Al Sharpton" and "white interlopers," and so on. Tell them to Google on "Jeremiah Wright" and "Louis Farrakhan," and then on "Farrakhan" and "gutter religion." (Farrakhan also called the Pope the Antichrist, and you can add that MoveOn.org published a derogatory cartoon of Pope Benedict in 2005.)

http://obamasharpton.blogspot.com/2007/06/obama-walk-for-change-volunteers-things.html for some talking points
http://obamasharpton.blogspot.com/2007/06/what-to-tell-obama-walk-for-change.html for some more talking points

They may argue that Obama cannot control who endorses him. That is entirely true, but he can control whose endorsement he accepts. Ronald Reagan, for example, threw the Ku Klux Klan's endorsement back in its face, but Obama appeared at the equivalent of a Klan meeting: Sharpton's National Action Network. It is a hate group, and arguably a violent one given its role in the Freddy's Fashion Mart incident.

Another talking point:

Be sure then to ask three questions:
1. Will you join Barack Obama today and sign up to be a part of this movement? (If yes,
have the person fill out the information in the provided space in the literature. Be sure
to collect information before leave the house.)
2. Would you also like to volunteer to help out the campaign? (Indicate this in the
provided space on the card.)
3. Barack isn’t taking contributions from Washington lobbyists or special interests, which
is why we need people like you to donate to continue our fight for change. Would you
like to donate $25 today for change? (You can ask the person to donate at the door and
collect it in the campaign-provided remit envelopes, or you may choose to leave them
with the person at the door.)

The response to the latter is, "How do you feel about being used to collect money for an individual who appears in public with, and thus gives credibility to, vicious racists, anti-Semites, and other hate mongers? Do you think the people from whom you collected money or pledges would have donated it had they known these things? Would you have still asked them for it had Obama's campaign told you about them?"

Again, it is of the utmost importance to be polite and even sympathetic to the Walk for Change volunteers. THEY are not bigots, anti-Semites, or Catholic-haters, and Obama's campaign staff certainly didn't bother to tell them about the loathsome individuals and organizations whose support Obama is courting. They are VICTIMS, not villains, and we must treat them accordingly. We don't want them to feel angry at or about us, we want them to be angry at Obama and his campaign staff--angry enough to quit on the spot, or at least sufficiently discouraged to lack enthusiasm for the rest of the day's door-to-door activity.