When somebody asks me about how the internet changes politics, I want to tell them about canvassing. Because if the story stops with "how many house parties" or "how many people go to SC," then it actually stops right at the foot of the experience, right before it happens. Internet-enabled canvassing creates spaces that never existed before.

I looked up Obama's SC office online, they emailed me the $26/night hotel, I used Google Maps to find the location, I showed up, they used computer printouts from a massive database, and an attached mapquest-generated map, and an attached database generated canvass map, to give me a set of doors to knock on. Eight years ago none of this would have happened.

But below the fold is what the canvass actually feels like--the real "internet" campaign.

Depending on your frame of reference, canvassing sounds either like getting ready to paint, or like putting something over the back of the truck to keep the hay from getting wet, or the thing you fall on after getting punched in the nose in a boxing match.

***

I canvassed for Barack Obama in Florence, South Carolina last week, in five different neighborhoods, and if anything, it started like a protective act, technical and nervous, and became something far wilder and more beautiful, like the magical creative process of pushing oil paint around on an already complex painting, right before it dries.

First we were assigned the brick mc-mc-mansion neighborhood, organized around a fake lake, with street names like “Parliament” and “Constitution,” each house slightly different (the small portico, the large portico, the portico on the side). A few people opened the door, with a kind of secretarial nervousness; polite, but unsure. The primary response was a formal version of fear—small fear, not Cape Fear fear. A third in fear that we were scam artists (the Obama office was out of buttons, so we had to over-cheerily wave a bent cardboard sign as evidence of our mission), a third in fear that we were LDS, but then another third unafraid, but unengaged: in expectation of a delivery of a nice thought, packaged as one might a new shirt from Ann Taylor. All the dogs in the neighborhood were reined in by invisible fences, barking at us from invisible limits.

***

The etymology is actually even darker than the boxing mat. To canvas used to mean to throw someone in a canvas bag (canvas coming originally from cannabis, for hemp), as a punishment.

“Do you want to,” history whispers “run around the neighborhood bagging people, tying them up, and kicking them around a little …” Is this really a question one asks in polite conversation? Puss in Boots comes to mind, not Change You Can Believe In.

***

The lower-rent part of the neighborhood (off the lake, nearer the highway), was a little more chatty. A woman in an SUV dropped off three teenage boys and then did a U-turn to come talk to us. “You’re with Obama, right?” She asked, a long brown pony-tail, perfect nails easy on the wheel, flushed cheeks, “so I have a question.” She wanted to know how to think about his Muslim faith. She missed the republican primary so figured she’d vote in this next one, and had heard good things about him, but was a little concerned about him being Muslim. After that was cleared up, she just wanted to talk about how much she disliked Hillary, which, to my boyfriend’s horror, I happily indulged in. “I don’t trust her either,” I said gleefully, shaking my head.

***

Door-to-door. Yes, that’s much nicer, not canvassing as putting people in hemp bags as punishment. Do you want to “go door to door?” -- the o’s tripping over each-other to get to the smooth ending, like Robert Frost’s “Master Speed,” the favorite poem of weddings:

That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.
Life is only life is like saying politics is only about what people care about.

***

In the next neighborhood, the following morning, a flock of cardinals flew like spattered paint across the small road between tiny, brick, four-room houses. The trees looked 200 feet tall, young and knobbly, Giacometti’s holding vines likes skeins of wool. No one was home—a sunny Friday morning—so I hung the door hangers as quickly as I could on the knobs, running up and down small sidewalks like I was a fifth grader trying to get 70% on the shuttle run in the Presidential fitness award. A couple of 20 year old women sat idling in an SUV, smoking and laughing, and called me over to give them information about the vote, and happily said they planned to vote for Obama. The dogs lived behind real fences here.

***

My friend Tim instant messaged me:

i loved going door to door in iowa

you learn stuff

i dunno what, but something

***

In the trailer park—if you can call 14 trailers a park, more like a trailer garden—next to this lot, a lanky man ambled towards me tucked into his hoodie like a turtle. “I’m out here for Obama,” I said. “He’s going to be in town tonight.” He took my door hanger and slid it somewhere as quickly as a magician—in the hoodie? in his pants?—

and kept walking. His neighbor walked three times around the car, wondering why I wasn’t coming to talk to her. She wasn’t on my list, but there’s something really rude feeling about walking past a house—especially if you’re the curious kind, it would drive me mad to see someone walking to half the houses, but not mine—so I walked over. She listened solemnly, and thanked me. I was feeling expansive so I waved down a car that was bouncing out of the lot. The unrolled their windows and I got stoned just standing there. “Sure!” the driver said, “I’ll take one,” as I gave her some flyers about the event that night.

The next woman was leaning against her car. “He’s in luck!” she said, when I introduced myself. “I was between Clinton and Obama, but I wanted to know what the church said, so I called my sister.” Her sister told her that the Church didn’t believe in women as leaders. “That isn’t exactly my reason,” I said, rolling my eyes, and she laughed.

***

Words, they say, can make a difference. Do you want to go door-to-door?

The words swing in your head, each door like pushing water past toward some uncertain home. Each push of the oar is a push away from the sweetness of half-shut eyes, and like the Lotus Eaters from Tennyson it is not always clear that passive comfort is not better than the “labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar.”

***

That night, Friday night at 5:30, we were in East Florence. A lot of women answered the door in their nightgowns. Several spots on my list had vacant lots with nothing but a burned down house, or, in one case, nothing but a massive satellite transmitter, a fence, and a mowed lawn—as if ET had lived here just a few days ago, and, while actively supporting Obama, had to get home before the vote.

The correlation between my list and Obama supporters seemed pretty weak now, so I regularly just talked to whomever I saw, including at least three men with red vacancy in their eyes, including several men walking through the evening hunched, who would suddenly turn and talk and smile—no red in their eyes—the minute you talked to them. Young women and men stopped their cars to see what I was doing, and many of them already supported Obama, and already knew there was an event in Florence.

There were a handful of churches in this neighborhood, mostly just houses with church names and service times. One long house had big black crosses and verses all over it—it was the Church of something or other, I wish I’d written down the name—he was on my list, so I stopped by with a flyer. How are you thinking about the election, I asked? His breath was wine-hot, and his eyes were swollen. His dog was on a chain.

“I’ve decided,” he said, “for the other one.”

One woman came out of her house, immaculate and light blue. She was in her 40’s, her eyes were clear, and she had no middle teeth. She wasn’t on my list, but she was there, and when I started talking, she moved up to the center of her porch and spoke out to me and my waiting boyfriend. “Obama and Clinton are the same,” she said. “They worked for the same law firm in New York. They take the same money from lobbyists. They are the reason we don’t have the medicare we need, the health care for people in this community. I support John Edwards.” “I like Edwards too,” I said, which was true.

Mostly, I like canvassing. By the third day, I would loosely follow the map of names given, but also feel free to criss-cross back and forth, returning once to a house that said they had already voted to get the best directions to the voting location for their neighbors, talking longer and looser and more freely than I had the first day.

Canvassing opens up a space. It gives me permission to talk to anyone. When I show up on the street, carrying a sign, or show up at someone’s door and introduce myself—regardless of the political culture of that neighborhood—and there is the moment of recognition. They expect you to be there. They have been told this will happen. Someone will come to their door and talk about the election. And in that recognition, an enormous space is opened up that is not normally there—we belong here, we think, and so lets talk awhile. Not just about politics, but about anything. About cars getting towed, about boyfriends, about military service, about where the Leatherman Senior Center is and whether the new sports complex is too large.

It is a dance, and like all dances, at its best it takes artifice and turns it into something lovely, door-to-door as do-si-do, we swing around each other. I walked up to one open door, Harry Potter blaring on the TV, and a woman answered it in her bra, giggling. She was going for Obama, but wanted to know what the ID requirements were for her kids.

She giggles in embarrassment and puts on her shirt, but she expects me there, so we can talk.