Volunteers full of hope mount Obama blitz

BETH REINHARD, Miami Herald

Saturday, July 12, 2008

W hat would drive a grown woman to spend 2 ½ hours in the broiling July sun just to register a couple of voters who may or may not support Barack Obama?

If you ask Robyn Vandenberg, a 44-year-old stay-at-home mom in Hollywood, she will tell you about her teenage son with a heart condition. She can't find a pediatric surgeon to see him because they don't have health insurance.

She will also talk about the war in Iraq and how she can't imagine any of her three sons having to die for what she sees as a lost cause.

Vandenberg is among 400 Obama ''fellows'' in Florida, 3,600 nationwide, who are giving up six weeks of their summer to volunteer for the Democratic campaign. Vandenberg works 80, 90 hours a week and plans to keep plugging away after most of the other ''fellows'' go back to college.

''I feel like I don't have a choice,'' she said, standing outside the Workforce One employment agency in Hollywood, clipboard and registration forms in hand. ``There's too much at stake not to do anything.''

After a few weeks in which some Obama supporters fell out of love, disenchanted by his vote for President Bush's wiretapping, retreat on gun control and flip-flop on campaign finance, Vandenberg's zeal is a reminder of the presumptive nominee's ability to inspire. The campaign is gearing up to reinforce its volunteer brigade with as many as 300 staffers across Florida, in what could be the largest get-out-the-vote operation in the party's history.

''Imagine the residual effect of an operation like that for the Democratic Party,'' said Kirk Wagar, Obama's campaign finance chairman in Florida.

Unlike the string of beaten-down people walking past Vandenberg into Workforce One to see a job counselor, she looks like she has money. She's blonde and has a French manicure, but she says the designer sunglasses are fake and calls herself ''middle class.'' That's the problem when it comes to taking care of her ailing son -- her husband makes too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to purchase insurance.

A young couple brushes off her question about registering to vote, a baby strapped to the man's chest. She approaches a middle-age man in a plaid shirt who shrugs, ``I'm not an American.''

Vandenberg likes to canvass in places unaccustomed to seeing a presidential campaign, like the Swifty Coin Laundry in Hollywood and the Eagle's Wings Development Center in Hallandale Beach. At the community center, she met an ex-felon, an older gentleman, who said he didn't know if he had gotten his voting rights back.

Vandenberg dialed the state clemency board and handed him her cellphone.

''I could see his eyes welling up with tears,'' she said. ``I will never ever forget that man.''

Another ''fellow'' in Florida, Ben Zeskind, described a similar moment at a ''unity party'' with the Red Hat Society, a women's club in Richmond Heights. By the end of the night, the 25-year-old scruffy Jewish guy from Palmetto Bay was posing for pictures with the older, black ladies from one of Miami's less affluent neighborhoods.

Finally, a passerby stops to hear Vandenberg's pitch, pulling out her wallet to see if her voter registration is up to date. But then, muttering something about how she might move again, she walks away.

''Who knows what might happen later today?'' Vandenberg insisted, dismissing the morning's shabby registration stats. ``We could knock on a door and register a whole family to vote.''

Apparently, she's knocking with a fistful of that hope that Obama keeps talking about.