“Hungry for Change”: Obama gets baked in Atlanta
June 23, 2008 at 1:29 pm by David Lee Simmons in News
What is it with liberals and bake sales, anyway? They’re fascinated by them. I’m thinking of the bumper sticker plastered all over Volvos back in the day that bemoaned, “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” A more recent example came from the 2006 campaign, “Bake Sales for Body Armor,” which “is dedicated to saving the lives of our soldiers by raising funds to buy body armor, medical supplies, and other items that promote their health and welfare.”
Laugh all you want. There’s gold in them cookies, as the presidential campaign for Barack Obama proved over the weekend with its “Hungry for Change” campaign that staged more than 700 bake sales all over the country — including several in Atlanta. The timing of the Saturday sales could not have come at a more ironic moment as they came on the heels of the presumptive Democratic nominee’s pledge-breaking announcement that he would opt out of accepting public financing for his campaign. Under those restrictions, Obama could have received no more than $85 million — peanuts these days, considering that Obama already has raised a couple hundred million, and some estimates see him reaching half a billion by the fall elections.
The wisdom and ethics of his decision depends on your perspective, I suppose. Critics say his decision shows him as a two-timing hypocrite in that he had earlier pledged to accept public financing along with John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, and that he has campaigned as a reformer. Supporters say that, considering his unprecedented success at raising money at the grass-roots level — mostly on the Internet — Obama has redefined the entire concept of the term “public financing.”
Which brings us back to the bake sales, which could be found all over the Atlanta area on Saturday. (There was no confirmation about whether all the goodies were baked by left hands only.) I stopped by two of them in vastly contrasting neighborhoods: Little Five Points and Southwest Atlanta. The first one was hosted by Lexa King, an L5P resident of nearly a quarter century and Realtor. Like others, King learned of the bake sales through an email from MoveOn.org.
A white woman, King was a confirmed Hillary Clinton supporter who literally teared up when she spoke about the possibility of seeing the first woman elected president in her lifetime. “But now it’s time to switch gears,” she said amid a handful of friends and potential customers, scanning the two tables of fudge brownies, chocolate tassies and shortbread cookies on her sidewalk. Was it hard to switch, I asked? “No,” she replied firmly. “Ideologically, he still tracks the things I believe in. He can get us out of that horrible war. And he talks about values, the things that I believe in, like all of us being able to make a decent living, honesty, and not about corporate greed, health care for your family. And how about diplomacy instead of pointing guns at each other?”
King didn’t seem too bothered by any notions of hypocrisy on Obama’s part by opting out of the public-financing system, either. “However he wants to fund his campaign … That’s not what’s important to me,” she said. “You know? It all counts.” As far as how Obama’s decision affects his reputation as a reformer, King said, “I’ll leave that to the candidates. That falls to the bottom of my list of priorities. Obama, when you see him being able to get to where he has gotten, without some huge stock portfolio or whatever … .
“I look at it as, last time (2004), I did nothing and look what happened,” she said, after voting for John Kerry. So I had to do something no matter how small. That’s what this nation was built on: Doing small things.”
Standing nearby and chatting with neighbors was her friend, Jody Kaufman, a 44-year-old native of the Philippines who just a couple weeks ago had become a U.S. citizen. Kaufman works with her partner, Faiyaz Sayyed, a Singapore native, who also was at the sale. As someone who travels abroad, Kaufman marvels at the respect Obama’s name carries at the international level. “I really see how the U.S. market has gone down the drain,” said Kaufman, another recovering Clinton supporter. “I was in Europe, at a trade show in Istanbul, and I couldn’t believe how fanatical they were for Obama. As an outsider, I’m nervous. The economy is going down now, and how are people going to afford gas? It used to be America was looked up to. Now, how do you call it? Before we were on top. But now … .”
By the time we left, hours before it was over, the sale had raised around $60, with a steady trickle expected to come in the rest of the day.
The numbers were much higher over in Southwest Atlanta, where at the corner of Childress Drive and Campbellton Road some 15 volunteers were working both the street and the tented tables in the parking lot of the Savoy nightclub. A DJ from Warrior FM blasted Prince’s “Controversy” while passersby pulled over and shopped among the treats made both from the home and by caterers.
“Everyone’s bringing in $2, $3,” gushed Karen Ceesay (pictured), a local comedic actress who boasts of living in the neighborhood she proudly calls “Swatts!” In between keeping track of her 2-year-old Musa, Ceesay talked about the importance of raising money for Obama. “My husband’s from Gambia, and as corny as this sounds, one of the things that attracted me to Obama was his ties to Africa,” said the thirtysomething Ceesay, a former Edwards supporter.
She recalls her father, a former union organizer, dying on Election Day in 2004, and her trudging to the voting booth, eight months pregnant, to vote for Kerry. Ceesay admitted that race played a factor in her switch to Obama, but also what he stood for. If anything, she said, his supposed inexperience was a plus. “The longer the politicians are in office, the less they’re about the people,” she said. “When I first started looking at the legislation he was working on, I’m guessing he thought probably, “I can’t get anything done here! And now they’re making him into being the elitist, which is hilarious to me. He just paid off his student loans!”
The bake sale in Southwest Atlanta raised $500 — in very public fashion.
(Photos by David Lee Simmons; for more images, visit www.SideshowAtlanta.com)
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